


Heist Movies Can Suck It

by pprfaith



Series: Heist Movies Can Suck It [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: A little gore, Action, Alpha Peter Hale, Alternate Universe, Angst, As you do, Awful Police Procedure, Crime, Dragon Stiles, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Fluff, Full Shift, Genderfluid Character, Genderfluid Stiles, Heist, Humor, I forgot 17 tags, Kate Argent ist her own Warning, Lotsa stabby murder, M/M, Monster of the Week, Multi, Murder, Mystery, Non-Human Stiles, Nudity, Pack Bonding, Past Abuse, Sequel, Sexual Humor, Shapeshifting, The Sheriff's A+ Parenting, Violence, Violence against minors, pack as family, past trauma, please tell me what they are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-26 14:28:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 34,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16683358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: In which Stiles is under arrest for murder and everything goes to hell.(Resolving the mother of all cliffhangers. Finally. Direct sequel.)





	1. Wednesday

**Author's Note:**

> Yay, I finally did it! It's finished and will be posted in 4 parts over the next few days. Timing depends on the editing. 
> 
> Many, many thanks go to my lovely folks on tumblr who helped me make this legible and not a huge mess. It took forever with your help, so it probably would have never gone anywhere without. THANK YOU!!!

+

Wednesday

+

Stiles is having flashbacks to being twelve, and Deputy Willis locking him into the interrogation room to keep him from raiding everyone’s desks for ‘interesting cases‘. 

Only when he was twelve, there were no handcuffs involved and, oh yeah, no charges of mass murder. 

Stiles liked that time better than this time. 

He’s not handcuffed to the table, at least, though. Deputy Parrish (supernatural, but not sure what he is, according to Scott) is sitting across from him, a very slim, beige folder in front of him. Parrish’s smart phone is between them, app recording their every word. When Willis locked him in here, they still had a bulky tape recorder.

In the corner, Stiles’ father hangs like a wraith, alternately looking like livid and broken. He shouldn’t be here, he’s too close to this, Stiles is his _son_ , but that’s small town cronyism for you. When the bad guys do it, it’s nasty. When the cops do it, it’s honorable and full of manpain.

So maybe Stiles isn’t feeling very charitable toward his father at the moment. But then, the man just arrested him for murder. Which, for the record _he did not commit_. 

He hasn’t killed anyone in this town in a decade. Deaton is indirectly his fault, sure, but no cop on Earth can make that connection, so it totally doesn’t count. He always thought, if his dad would ever arrest him, it’d at least be for something he really did. Matt Daehler is still rotting away in a shallow grave only a few miles away from here.

“Mr. Stilinski,” Parrish starts, apparently deciding that Stiles isn’t going to start talking on his own. 

“Call me Stiles, this is only going to get confusing, otherwise. Also, can I have some coffee? I didn’t exactly manage breakfast before you accused me of mass murder and dragged me off.”

He shifts in his seat and regrets it as his still healing arm scrapes the edge of the table. A quick look down at his sleeve reveals that he didn’t tear any scabs. No blood. Good. He doesn’t want to explain the multiple bite wounds that look like they’re from a wild animal.

“Stiles!” his father growls, settling on livid for the moment. 

Parrish interrupts before he can say more than that. “Sheriff. We agreed you’d let me do this.” He turns back to Stiles. “You take it with sugar or milk?”

“Sugar. Lots of,” Stiles answers, with a little grin. He knows the other man is only trying to butter him up, but what the hell. Caffeine, man. Caffeine. He has the sneaking suspicion he’ll need to be sharp for this.

Parrish nods, stands and disappears out the door. The two minutes until he returns, two paper cups of shitty station coffee in hand, are utterly silent. Stiles can tell his father almost starts talking a dozen times, but the phone is still recording, and he holds himself back. 

Stiles accepts the cup with a little nod of thanks, blows on it briefly, takes a sip. Parrish does the same, which is semi-interesting because Stiles knows, from sharing coffee with his pack, that the temperatures he can stand? Give everyone else a scalded throat. But the deputy seems as immune to the heat as Stiles is. He’s either completely desensitized, or something a little different altogether. 

Finally, they get down to business. “Stiles, then. Where were you last night?”

“In bed. With my boyfriend.”

“Really? Your father says you weren’t home when he looked in on you in the evening.”

Stiles shrugs. “I was showing Peter around a bit. Old haunts, you know.”

“Yeah? Any places in particular? Maybe we can find a witness or two.”

Either his dad’s deputies have gotten worse at their jobs, or Stiles has somehow become jaded in regards to law enforcement, but this is almost cute. “Not really. We were mostly out in the preserve. Must have gotten back after dad dropped by.”

“I thought you said you were in town.”

“The preserve is part of the town.”

Hands raised, palms out. “Okay. So afterwards you went home and straight to bed? Until we came by?”

“Yep.”

Something pleased flickers across the man’s baby face, quickly turning sour with regret. A brief glance toward the Sheriff, who sets his jaw. 

Stiles just ran into a trap of some sort and they both know it. 

Before they can explain how, a tentative voice at the edge of his hearing asks, “Stiles can you hear me?”

Isaac. Judging by the direction and volume, he’s sitting on the ancient wooden bench on the other side of the far wall, in the hallway leading to the individual offices. It’s meant for people waiting to give statements and Stiles has spent many an afternoon on it as a child. 

It’s just barely close enough for him to hear. He doesn’t have the wolves’ super senses, can’t hear what’s happening across the building, but it’s enough for this. For a moment he pauses, bow taut, to see if Parrish Not Quite Human hears it too, but nothing. 

“Nevermind, I can hear your heartbeat going haywire. The girls have Peter under control. They’re heading for the crime scene now, to check it out. Alli called Chris for reinforcements, he’ll get here tonight. Lawyer’s en route, too, three hours.”

“Stiles? Did you hear me?”

He blinks back to Parrish in time to see the man give a frustrated huff. Smiles apologetically. “Sorry. The caffeine takes a while to hit me.”

“I said, it’s funny that you say you were home last night, because you see, Scott McCall noticed you had a tail yesterday when you met him for lunch. We did a little digging on that and found one Allison Argent and Isaac Lahey.”

Outside the room, Isaac quietly swears. Scott could have given them a damn heads up about this about being a bit too diligent a cop! Fuck! But then, he probably figured it was over with Deaton’s death and that he had time. Also, it was his first time being kidnapped and watching brutal supernatural murder. Some slack needs to be given, here. 

“They came in on the same plane as you, did you know? And rented their bikes at the same time you and your boyfriend rented your car. They’re staying at the California Beacon downtown.”

He pauses to give Stiles a chance to tie himself into more knots. Stiles gives him a raised eyebrow and sips his coffee. He hopes the girls find something and that they manage to keep Peter leashed, because he has no doubt that the man is about ready to rip through the entire BHPD to get Stiles out. He gets a little deranged when Stiles is taken away from him. 

Eventually, Parrish keeps talking. “Incidentally, their room number is the same one as your friend, Lydia Martin’s. Apparently, they’re sharing a suite.”

“Still not sure how that ties into what I did last night.”

“Getting to that. The CCTV in the hotel’s lobby records you and your boyfriend heading up to the suite separately, about thirty minutes apart, around 5pm and 5.30pm yesterday. There is no record of you leaving, either by the front or the back door. Yet, somehow, you were at your father’s house this morning. So I ask again, Stiles, where were you last night?”

Fuck Deaton. Even from the afterlife, the man is making life hard for Stiles. They left this very broad, very obvious trail for whoever was after Stiles. While Lydia was quietly cleaning up their actual secrets, they left those crumbs to be followed instead. Real names, credit cards, CCTV footage. Obvious and bright neon, blaring challenge. Here we are. Come at us. It was meant for Deaton. 

Instead it’s now being used against Stiles. 

Coming back to this town was a mistake. A huge, fucking, awful mistake. Should have just let the whole thing sink to the bottom of the ocean with Deucalion and his little scheme. Should have ignored the hints of a leak. Should not have fallen into the trap. 

Stiles always knew that this town would pull him back one day. He didn’t want it to be like this. 

“How about we make a deal?” he asks. 

Immediately, the other men perk up. “Not that kind of deal. I’m not confessing to anything, because I haven’t done anything. No. You tell me what exactly it is I’m being accused of in the first place, because I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, and after that, maybe I’ll tell you where I was.”

That proves too much for his dad, who surges forward, slams both palms onto the table and roars, “This isn’t a game, Stiles!”

Stiles leans back and ignores the little whimper Isaac gives. Raging fathers always put him in a bad place. Still. 

“No,” he answers, very coolly and very calmly, both for his sake and for his friend’s. “It’s not. I still have a right to know what I’m being charged with. So enlighten me.”

For a second Stiles honestly thinks his father is going to grab and shake him. Then Parrish is between them, physically shoving his boss away from the table. “Sheriff, calm down. You need to either calm down, or leave. John. John, do you hear me?”

Finally, the man relents. His eyes stay on Stiles though, alive with anger. “I expected better from you,” he hisses.

And Stiles fires right back, “I expected better from you, too.” 

It’s always been this way, with them. They don’t fight for years and years but when they do, they go from zero to wanting to hurt each other as much as possible in three seconds flat. 

John didn’t want a murderer for a son? Well, Stiles didn’t want a negligent alcoholic who believes his son capable of homicide at the drop of a hat. 

Parrish apparently has enough, because he gives a brief shout of, “Stop it!”

Then he sits back down like nothing happened. “You are being accused of the murder of four people, found early this morning in a warehouse by the old subway station. Three of them are not yet identified. The fourth is Dr. Alan Deaton. You remember him?”

Stiles nods. So. The crime scene is the warehouse Deaton dragged them to. Who are the three extra bodies?

“How did you land on me?”

“A gun was found at the scene. Your fingerprints were all over it. It’s registered to your name.”

Okay. This is getting weird now. Or rather, the weird is starting to fall into a pattern. Said pattern looks a lot like a frame. 

“That’s impossible,” Stiles says.

“What is?” 

“The gun. I own exactly two guns. The Colt dad gave me when I moved to New York with Lydia and a Glock I got for work, about six years ago. We flew in commercially. I didn’t bring either of them.”

Not that he usually uses them. They’re in the New York apartment’s safe and only Alli takes them out every now and then to clean them. Stiles has other, less traditional weapons on hand. The kind that can’t be taken from him. Ditto Peter.

Parrish nods, pulls a printout from his folder. “The Colt, the Glock, and a Beretta.”

“I don’t own a Beretta. Never have.”

The deputy taps the sheet. “It’s right here, in your information,” he says, but he’s starting to sound doubtful. Stiles isn’t playing innocent now. He’s honestly baffled and he lets it show.

The two cops exchange looks.

Isaac curses, sudden, low and visceral. “Fuck! Stiles? Stiles, Lydia ID’d one of the vics. It’s Enrico Calavera.”

“Fuck!” it bursts out of Stiles before he can contain it. The Calaveras are a hunting family and they are dangerous. Even Stiles and crew know better than to fuck with them. And someone just killed at least one of them with a gun falsely registered to Stiles in his hometown, the night he got kidnapped by an insane druid and thus has no alibi. 

In less than twenty-four hours, this town will be crawling with Calaveras out for revenge and they won’t care that it’s a shoddy frame job. They’ll just want him dead for murdering Enrico. Araya Calavera’s favorite grandson. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Both his dad and Parrish are giving him wary looks. He ignores them in favor of trying, desperately, to find a way around doing what he needs to do, what he knows he needs to do and never wanted to. Shit. 

“Scott just came in from the scene,” Isaac reports. “He smells like wolfsbane. He has some evidence. It’s definitely hunters.”

“Check the database,” he tells Parrish, voice hard. “Check it. Have your IT guys check the date for the entry. I have never owned a Beretta in my life and I bet you, the entry isn’t older than a few days. Someone hacked the database and put that gun in and then used it to kill those people. I’m being framed.”

His dad snorts, anger still riding him. Parrish shakes his head. “That’d be very bad work.”

Stiles chuckles darkly. “It doesn’t have to be good. It’s not meant to hold up to police scrutiny.”

“Then who is it meant for?”

“A bunch of people who only need an excuse.” For the first time, he turns to his father. “Dad, please. Check the information. It’s fake. Come on, I didn’t kill four people and then leave me gun with my fingerprints on it right next to them. If you believe nothing else, then believe this: I’m not stupid. If I really murdered someone, I’d be better at it. Check. And then let me go, or there’s going to be a whole lot more bodies on the ground.”

The Sheriff takes a deep, shuddering breath. “What the fuck have you gotten yourself into, son?”

“I’ll explain. All of it. I never wanted to, but I will. But first, you have to get me out of here.”

Parrish purses his lips, turns to the Sheriff, who nods. 

“I’ll get Marcy to have a look at it. If what you say is true, it shouldn’t take her more than thirty minutes.”

He’s at the door when Stiles says, “Deputy?”

“Yes?”

“Stick around, will you? I’ve got a feeling this is your kind of thing.”

Imperceptibly, the man’s eyes widen. He shoots a look at his boss, then nods and leaves the room. 

+

It takes Marcy, whoever that is, only twenty-five minutes to find the actual posting date of Stiles’ falsely registered gun, instead of the backdated fake one. And hey, look, it’s yesterday. What a shocker. 

Parrish comes back with the information on a sheet, shows it to the Sheriff. 

“That still leaves us with your fingerprints on it,” he points out. 

“Hey, fake gun, fake fingerprints. Either they lifted mine from somewhere, or they hacked that information, too. I don’t know. Come on, Dad.” Stiles bites his tongue, forces himself to not finish the sentence. _You were so quick to condemn me, now be as quick at redeeming me._

Yeah. That one’s going to fester for a while. One piece of shoddy evidence and Stiles might as well change his name to Judas, no questions asked. 

Now that the anger and the adrenaline are wearing out, the hurt is setting in. Stiles wants Peter. He wants to be small and quiet and let Peter surround him until the world is only a bad dream.

He can’t, though. 

Finally, the Sheriff sighs. “Alright. Alright. You’re free to go. _After_ you’ve explained things.”

Stiles shakes his head, holds up his cuffed wrists. “Get those off me, then we’ll go somewhere private, then I’ll catch you up. I’d rather only do this once and there are more people involved.”

Parrish waits for a nod from the Sheriff before undoing the handcuffs. The Sheriff opens the door and motions Stiles through with a tired, “After you, then.”

Stiles doesn’t have time to make up right now. He blows past his father, already talking. “Isaac, find Scott, meet us outside. You got a bud?”

His answer is something tiny flung at him from his right as Isaac blows past the three of them, making a beeline to Scott’s desk. Stiles wedges the earwig in place and announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world’s shittiest frame job.”

Alli and Lydia give small hellos. Peter just breathes Stiles’ name, once. There’s a dark, ugly growl under it. 

“Easy, big guy. Meet us at my dad’s, okay? I’m alright, everything’s fine.”

“Can you two not do your weird codependent thing on comms,” Isaac complains as he and Scott catch up just before the front doors. The Sheriff pauses briefly to give instructions to Juliette, the ancient warden of the front desk, then follows.

“Shut up, you and Alli do it all the time,” Stiles counters, because he needs this now. A bit of normal in the middle of his past and his present clashing violently. 

“Do not.”

“You’re the reason we have a no-fucking-on-comms rule, puppy.”

Scott giggles. Parrish snorts. His dad just looks constipated. “Who are you talking to?”

“You’ll see. ETA?”

“Fifteen,” Lydia answers. Pauses. “Ten. Apparently, your wolf is driving.”

“Fantastic. See you there.” He catches the extra helmet Isaac throws him, throws a wave at the three cops watching. “Dad’s place. Let’s move. If I’m right, and I usually am, we’ll have a bloodbath here within twenty-four hours. Hurry up.”

With that, he slips onto the bike behind Isaac and holds on tight.

+

The gang got there first and are waiting on the porch when first Stiles and Isaac and then a cruiser pull up in short order. Stiles double times it up the steps to Peter, who grabs him in a bear hug, burying his face in Stiles’ neck, aggressively scenting him. 

Stiles sinks his fingers into dark hair and holds on.

“What’s going on?” he hears his dad ask, somewhere behind him.

“Werewolves are tactile creatures,” Lydia informs him chipperly, “And Peter doesn’t do well without Stiles.”

Then someone finally gets the door and they all file into the living room to the Sheriff’s semi-snarled, “Did you just say ‘werewolves’?!”

Stiles lets Peter pull him down onto his lap and sends his BFF a look. “Yeah, hadn’t gotten around to that, yet, thanks Lyds.”

She flips her hair and takes a prim seat on the arm of the sofa Peter claimed. Alli takes Peter’s other side and Isaac sits half on her lap, half on the other arm. Scott, looking unimpressed after the bloody cuddle fest he witnessed last night, just throws himself into the nearest chair. Parrish follows his example. The Sheriff remains standing, staring at Stiles and his people.

Stiles sighs. “Okay. Introductions all around. Peter Hale, werewolf.” He can _feel_ Peter flash his eyes and fangs. “Allison Argent, hunter extraordinaire, Isaac Lahey, also werewolf, Lydia Martin, banshee, and me, Stiles Stilinski, spark. Which reminds me, Scott, my man, you couldn’t have maybe told us that you were running traces on Alli and Isaac?”

The man in question cringes. “Dude, I totally forgot. Sorry.”

Allison shrugs. Isaac winks. All forgiven. Then Isaac abruptly turns to Parrish, “What are you? You smell like fire and brimstone. It’s almost like Stiles, except… ashier.” He wrinkles his nose. 

Parrish ducks his head, sends the Sheriff a look, shrugs. “I… I don’t know. I can’t figure it out and there’s no-one I could ask.”

Lydia gives a derisive little sniff. “It can’t be that hard,” she declares. Challenge accepted. Parrish will know before the end of the week. 

They’re all startled when the Sheriff suddenly slumps into the last available seat, like all his strings are cut. “Werewolves? Banshees? What’s a spark?”

“Magic, mostly,” Stiles explains, not feeling the least bit guilty about the lie. He’s not opening the can of worms that is explaining that Claudia Stilinski lied to his father for the entirety of their marriage by pretending to be human. Or the fact that Stiles is pretty sure the reason she went mad is because she forced herself to stay in one form for so long, rather than explain the truth to her husband. 

“All the supernatural crap you’ve heard of is real, for the most part, and we’re all involved in it. _Ash Investigations_ is really less of a PI business and more of a supernatural whatever-you-need.”

Including murder, theft and all manner of other illegal activities. Also not explaining that. 

Scott pipes up. “It’s okay, Sheriff. Stiles is still Stiles, Lydia’s still Lydia. They’re the same people, just with extras.”

“Extras like doing magic and dating a werewolf,” John mutters, then shakes himself free of the thought. Stiles can practically see the man shove all his emotions, all that pesky disappointment and frustration, into a box, to focus on what’s really important to him: his job. “That still doesn’t explain what’s going on right now.”

Okay. Stiles can do that. He can shove everything else into a corner and focus. Let the hurt be. For now. He rubs his forehead, somehow manages to jostle his injured arm while he does it, and hisses. Peter immediately rests a hand on his neck and starts drawing out the pain in black, spidery veins. 

God, Stiles loves that man. 

Lydia, being the goddess that she is, takes that as her cue to catch everyone else up. “The three unidentified bodies at your crime scene are Calaveras.”

“All of them?” Isaac asks.

“All of them. I recognized Enrico, the others are wearing the skull symbol, too.”

“The Mexican drug cartel?”

“The drugs are only a front. They’re hunters. Supernatural hunters.”

“We hunt those who hunt us,” Allison pipes up and then takes over. “There are several old hunting families in the world. Mine is one of them. We had an… overhaul in policy years ago. My dad and I, we turned our code into something better than it was after he found out that some Argents thought the code gave them free license to run down and kill everything that wasn’t human.”

Peter’s growl is low and continuous and it vibrates down to Stiles’ bones. He wraps an arm around his wolf’s neck and draws his face into his chest, making quiet shushing noises. Peter and Allison had it out years ago, and they’re pack now, love each other like pack should. But it doesn’t make the reminders easier. 

“My aunt burned Peter’s entire pack alive. Wolf, human, adult, children. All of them,” Allison explains, quietly. The fire is only ever spoken about in whispers, when it’s spoken about at all. They all have their tragic backstories, the things only mentioned in the dark. This is Peter’s. Allison’s is her mother’s suicide after she was bitten by a rogue alpha. Stiles’ is always, eternally his parents, Lydia’s the death following her, Isaac’s his abusive pack and father. Ghosts. Triggers. 

She moves swiftly on. “The Calaveras aren’t as bad as the Argents, in that they stick to the letter of the code, if not the spirit. They don’t hunt anything that isn’t a threat, but the slightest provocation is enough for them to strike, fast and hard. They won’t care that Stiles didn’t kill their people. They’ll use it as an excuse and they’ll rain hellfire down on every supernatural they can find in this town.”

“Someone wanted this,” Parrish summarizes.

“Yes,” Lydia answers. “Which brings me to the assumption that they know what Stiles is. We’ve been hiding it for years, but it’s recently gotten out. At this point, I’d say whoever set this up, also let the Calaveras know what they’re facing.”

“So basically, I’m fucked,” Stiles concludes.

“Puppeteer,” Peter rumbles into his chest, before bringing up his head to speak more clearly. “Our mysterious string puller set up the druid, and undoubtedly somehow caused him to set up Deucalion, too. And now this.”

“Why? Okay, so, they obviously know what I am. Why are they suddenly telling everyone? If they want me dead, a sniper would do the job just as well. Why go to all this trouble? All these convoluted, complicated, far-fetched plans. It makes zero sense.”

“Maybe killing you isn’t the point,” Alli muses.

“Then what is? Sucking out my power? Enslaving me? We had that. It failed.”

“Hold on!” John interrupts. “Did you say enslave?”

Stiles flaps a hand. “It’s where we were last night. Deaton drugged us, kidnapped us and tried to magically make me his slave. He was crazy, don’t try to make sense of it.”

The Sheriff opens his mouth, face reddening, jaw tensing and then, visibly, barely, reigns himself in. Pulls back whatever it is, trying to work its way out of his throat, whatever accusation is dammed behind his teeth. He already accused Stiles of murder once today. “What happened?”

“So quick to condemn,” Peter murmurs, almost like he knows what the man was going to say, before he changed his mind. He answers instead of Stiles, voice cold and sharp. “The good doctor had another magical being enslaved to do his bidding. When the binding broke, it took its revenge on him. Don’t fret, Sheriff, your son’s hands are clean.”

This time. Some nights, Stiles still dreams of the feel of Deucalion’s skin melting under his hands. Some nights, Peter does, too, and they both wake shaking. 

“Well, excuse me if I don’t know what to think anymore. I’m new to this!”

“Guys,” Isaac, ever the peacemaker, interrupts. “Can we focus? I don’t want to get gunned down by pissed-off hunters! I’m too young to die ugly!”

“Right,” Lydia announces, businesslike, into the ensuing silence. Isaac’s good for nothing if not the occasional reality check, well disguised as pointless whining. “Two priorities: find out who our,” she purses her lips, obviously hating the word, “ _puppeteer_ is, and head off the Calaveras. Suggestions?”

“Find out where the bodies came from,” Stiles immediately offers. He’s been thinking about that since Isaac said ‘Calavera’. “Deaton died around midnight last night. That’s less than twenty hours. How did they find three hunters to kill in that short time? Because they weren’t sitting around, waiting to be murdered, I’m guessing.”

“The bodies were fresh and there were no ligature marks or bruises,” Scott confirms. He hesitates briefly, gives his boss a look, then adds, “The rest of the place looks the way it did when we left last night.”

The Sheriff exhales heavily through his nose, but doesn’t say anything.

“My dad’s coming down. Araya will at least hear him. Maybe he can convince her that the trap is so obvious, it’d probably do more harm than good to take the bait.” Allison tugs on her hair, frustrated.

“And if he can’t?” Peter. 

“We can try to catch them as they arrive. They’re bound to have weapons? Right? If they’re crossing borders, or connected to the drugs, we might be able to detain them,” Parrish adds. 

Stiles shoots him a quick grin. “I’m starting to like you,” he declares. “If that fails, too, we’ll have to fight. Which is shit, because then the old broad will have a real reason to come down on us, and no-one wants that.”

“What if you… I don’t know, just knock people out and send them back to her?” That’s Scott, ever the optimist. 

Stiles shrugs. “It’d make a nice gesture and force them to pipe down or risk losing face, but in a fight with armed fanatics, you don’t always get that choice, Scotty.”

Peter, for one, is going to rip any hunter coming after him to shreds with extreme prejudice. They’ll be lucky if he leaves enough to send back in an envelope. Alli and Stiles, too, aren’t inclined to leave survivors in their wake. Maybe they’ll manage to curb their inner psychos better than Peter, but why would they? They didn’t start this. 

“We should alert the other supernaturals we know. Spread the word. Some will want to go to ground.” The rest, Lydia leaves unspoken, might be useful in a fight. 

Scott fidgets in his seat and Stiles remembers, “Did you talk to Kira?”

His old friend nods. “Yeah. Uhm… kitsune? Although I’m not really sure what that is? She says she can catch lightning, though, which is cool.”

All around Stiles, the pack cringe. “Okay, first rule, buddy. Generally, we don’t out other supernaturals without their permission, okay?”

Scott flushes, ducks his head. “Oh, yeah. That’s probably… if there’s hunters and stuff… shit. But you guys are good guys.”

“Still not nice. It’s private.”

Scott nods, then jerkily stands. “I’ll… go call Kira. To warn her. And to apologize, I guess. Is it okay if she wants to help? I think she might. And she’s badass!”

Stiles shrugs. “Only if she wants. We can use all the help we can get, at this point.”

+

An hour later, most everyone has trickled back out of the house. Parrish and Scott are headed back to the station to try and track the dead hunters’ movements and maybe find the hacker that gifted Stiles with a false gun registration. 

Isaac and Allison have gone to pack up the hotel room and get the lay of the land. If they’re going to be fighting, they’re going to be the ones choosing the battleground. Lydia has set herself up with coffee, Stiles’ laptop and her phone to rustle up contacts and hunt down information. 

That leaves the two Stilinski men and Peter at loose ends. The Sheriff made no move to return to work with his deputies, and they didn’t ask him to. Instead he stayed where he was, in his armchair, watching Stiles relax into Peter. 

He’s tired, still healing, and so fucking done with all this drama. He wants to be alone with Peter. He wants to be home, in their apartment. He wants to be able to randomly switch between shapes, because he’s held this one for three days straight now and the days when that felt natural are long gone. 

(He knows why his mother went mad with the slow decay of trapping herself in one form. He isn’t even trueblood, and he knows.)

His entire body feels like a giant itch. He wants to kill something. 

Peter, sensing that, hasn’t come up for air from where he’s burrowed up against Stiles in ten minutes. 

“How long?” his dad asks, eventually, breaking the silence. 

“How long what?”

“How long have you known about all this and not told me?”

The instinctive answer is a lie. And this time, for once, the Sheriff would know it’s a lie. So Stiles shrugs. “High school?”

“And you never even considered telling me.” As angry as the man sounded at the station earlier, now he just sounds resigned. Stiles doesn’t know why. They’ve always been this way, since Claudia. Silent and not really talking to each other, unable to get the words out. They’ve always subsisted on the occasional hug and trailed-off sentence. Hard truths left this house when Stiles’ mom did. 

“I was protecting you.”

That earns him a choked laugh. “Not your job kid.”

“Would you have believed him?” Peter interferes. “If he’d come up to you at sixteen and told you he could do magic?”

“With proof,” the Sheriff answers, “yes.”

It rings hollow. Children shouldn’t need proof to make their parents believe them. Parents shouldn’t condemn their children on nothing more than a single piece of shoddily fabricated evidence. 

Stiles doesn’t know when his own father stopped trusting him. Can’t remember. It must have been a long time ago. 

“I can’t change it anymore, Dad. Time travel’s not in my wheelhouse. I never meant for you to be involved in this. Because as amazing as it can be, this world is pretty fucking scary, sometimes.”

Another laugh. Having exceeded his emotional conversation allotment for the day, John turn to Peter. “So, I guess you’re not really an antiquarian.”

“It’s a hobby,” Peter confesses, modestly.

“Hobbies don’t generally pay for watches like these.” Peter’s wearing something flashy and expensive, because sometimes, he’s more douchebag than person. Stiles snorts. The watch was actually a gift from him, and completely free, since he stole it from some rich asshole who flirted too hard and didn’t want to take no for an answer. 

“And neither, I imagine, does killing monsters. So what exactly is it the five of you do?”

“I’ll tell you,” Stiles says, truthfully. “If you ask me again, I’ll tell you. But plausible deniability walks out the door then, Dad. Think about it.”

There. That’s a line, drawn in the sand. Stiles all but confessed, without confessing a thing. If there’s even a shred of trust left…

The Sheriff gives a pained sigh, then shakes his head. Lets it lie. Lets it go. Stiles breathes.

“Shit, kid. Any other bombs you’d like to drop on me?”

Actually, yes, dad. Mom was a dragon, did you know? No. Not that. Never that. But Peter is squeezing Stiles’ thigh supportively, and Stiles knows what he wants him to do. To say. 

For his own sanity, if nothing else. 

So Stiles scrapes together his courage and lets the shift roll over him, head to toe, and practically melts the second she’s done. Shit, but that feels good. She wiggles a little and notices, for the first time, that she’s wearing one of the pairs of jeans that work for both male and female form. Subconscious her is awesome. Stretches down to roll up the cuffs a little, twists the t-shirt into a knot at her waist. 

No bra, but then she doesn’t really need one, always skinny as a rake. Peter accommodates her wiggling without a word, because he is the best partner a person could ask for. Stiles presses a brief kiss to the corner of his mouth in silent gratitude and gets one of his rare, completely open smiles in return. 

Then, and only then, does she turn to her father, armored and brave, with her wolf at her back. Always.

Her father, who is staring at her with tears in his eyes, completely shocked. “You….”

“It’s me. Actually me, just female. I sort of shift between the two?” She’s tempted to tell him that’s why his pregnant joke made such an impression two days ago, but that’s a subject for another time. 

Finally, the Sheriff chokes out, “You look just like your mother.”

And… oh. Oh. It’s been so long since her first time that Stiles has gotten used to it, to seeing herself as herself and not seeing her mom anymore, but of course. Of course. She cringes.

“No, kid. No. It’s… it’s fine. You’re beautiful. Is this… do you just do both?”

She raises both hands in a scale. “Girl days, boy days. You know I’ve never given a shit about gender or sexuality. I’m me, tits or not.”

“And you don’t have a problem with that?” That’s addressed to Peter and Stiles has the sudden mental image of her father threatening Peter with a shotgun if he hurts his baby girl. Years too late, and completely absurd, but hilarious. 

Peter shrugs languidly. “I’m with Stiles. Not her body.”

“Her?”

“Girl me, girl pronouns. Guy me, guy pronouns.” 

“Okay. I’ll…, kid come here?” 

And then she’s being hauled into a hug, warm and a bit musty but still so good. She hugs back, because she’ll never not hug her dad back, even if he was an asshole this morning and arrested her for murder. Even when there’s piles and piles of old hurts, still. For this, for daddy’s arms around her, she’ll let so much hurt go, forgive so much. 

Eventually, he pulls back, running a hand over her hair. It’s long, in this form, down to her shoulder blades. She kind of digs it, even if she still needs Lydia or Allison to do anything with it. “Your mom would have loved this.”

She really wouldn’t have, but Stiles doesn’t say that. Smiles. “Thanks, dad.”

That’s when his phone rings. 

+

Scott meets them in the emergency room bay, looking tense and tired. 

When Peter tumbles out of the cruiser after the Sheriff, he looks relieved. When he sees Stiles, it turns to confusion. Right. He hasn’t met this Stiles yet.

She marches right up to him, drags him into a half hug and says, “Dude, mouth closed, you’re catching pixies.”

… “Stiles?!”

“Yeah, I’m gorgeous, Peter’s a lucky man, I know. Now, what’s going on?”

For convenience’s sake, she takes a brief look around, notices that no-one’s near, and flips back to male. Fixes his clothes and then gives a stupidly gaping Scott an expectant look. “Well? You said it was urgent.”

“Uhm. Right. You’ll explain that later. Hikers were just brought in, both of them mauled by what looked like a wild animal. They said it was a wolf. Stiles, there are no wolves in California.”

Stiles snorts, because he’s the one who told him that, ages ago. 

“Did they mention the wolf’s eye color?” Peter asks, even though they can already guess. Full shift wolf? Probably not a regular omega. He and Peter exchange weighted looks.

“No? Why?”

“Nevermind. We need to talk to them.”

“They’re pretty badly clawed up. Don’t know if they’re conscious. But, Stiles?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Erica and Boyd.”

Well. Shit. 

“Kid?” his dad asks.

“We went to high school with them,” Stiles offers, following after Scott as he starts weaving them to the right place through the eternally busy ER. “Ran into Erica yesterday. She waitresses at the diner.”

He feels Peter’s hand ghost down to the small of his back and then drop away. Brief comfort. 

They reach a door with Melissa McCall posted in front of it, like a sentinel. She greets Scott with a brief hand to his arm, because he’s on duty, Stiles guesses, nods to the Sheriff and hugs Stiles like she hasn’t seen him in years, which, fair. She hasn’t. 

“Hi, you,” she beams. “What are you doing here?”

Stiles hugs her back, smiles. Melissa is the best not-mom a guy could have growing up and he misses her, sometimes. “Helping. Hopefully. Are they awake?”

She shoots a look at the two cops next to them, then nods and tells them all, “Yes. The both have a single bite wound to the abdomen. It looks gruesome, they’re already on anti-biotics, but they should be fine. Nasty scar, though. And a hefty trauma. They were hiking on their day off. Enjoying the sun.” She shakes her head. 

Stiles squeezes her hand. “They’ll be fine.”

“I hope so. I have to finish my rounds. You’re not leaving town without dinner at my place, got that?”

He salutes. “Can I bring Peter?”

She looks at the wolf for the first time, studying him carefully. Peter holds up admirably under her Sphynx gaze. “He’ll do,” she finally decrees and then marches off to save some more lives. 

“Yep,” Stiles summarizes, “still terrifying.”

Scott punches his shoulder for that and then quietly lets them into the room. Erica and Boyd are both drowsy but awake, lying in separate beds, pushed close. Stiles gives Peter a little shove toward them as he busies himself turning off their IVs.

“What are you doing?” Boyd asks. “Stiles?”

“Yeah, hi, man. Long time, no see. I’m turning off the meds because they’re not helping you.”

“What does that mean?” Erica asks. She sounds as small and scared as she did back in school. Stiles smiles at her. 

“Don’t worry. You’ll be ok. But, tell me. The thing that attacked, it had red eyes, didn’t it?”

Because full shift and omegas don’t leave survivors and a single bite to the midriff is a turning bite, not savage rage. 

Both heart monitors immediately ratchet up, so Stiles flips them off, too. 

Boyd makes an effort to sit up, to put his bulk between them and Erica. He’s brave. That’s good. He’ll need to be, in this world he’s just been flung into.

“You were bitten by a werewolf. And alpha without a pack, most likely. Its first and foremost instinct is to create others of its kind.” Peter steps forward. “Congratulations. You’re turning into werewolves.”

“Are you shitting me?” Erica demands and there’s the fire Stiles glimpsed yesterday.

In lieu of an answer, Peter flashes his beta shift at them. Both of them recoil and Stiles doesn’t need supernatural senses to smell the terror, the fear-memory on them. 

Peter shifts back after a few heartbeats. “It’s a gift,” he tells them. “Super speed, super strength. Healing. Senses. It’s all enhanced. I was born this way, have never been human, but I’ve been told the change is profound. There are dangers, especially right now, but it’s not a curse.”

‘Danger’ is an understatement. They have hunters on their doorstep, and now a rogue alpha on the loose. What the hell is going on here?

“Pack is awesome,” Stiles agrees, “And Erica, there’s a decent chance it’ll cure your epilepsy.” He smiles at her. “No more fits. Hell, a member of our pack even lost his peanut allergy when he turned.”

Isaac brags about that like he cured cancer. It’s kind of ridiculous and also weirdly adorable.

He lets that sink in. After a moment, Boyd slumps. “Werewolves,” he says, blankly, before turning toward his girlfriend, who is chewing on her lip and carefully, slowly, slipping one hand under her hospital gown to feel at her injury. She looks expectant, and after a moment, stunned. 

“It doesn’t hurt anymore, Boyd,” she gasps.

He tenses his abdominals experimentally. Frowns. They look at each other. Scott looks like he wants to say something, but the Sheriff, silent so far, bids him to be quiet. Stiles and Peter just watch them. 

Stiles is running a mental list of things they need to tell the two of them, immediate necessities. Peter, he knows, is compiling a list of stable packs to send them to.

Then Erica nods and Boyd turns to them. “You said you’re a pack.”

“Yeah. Not exactly a traditional one. Don’t have an alpha, and three out of five aren’t wolves, but yes. We’re pack.”

Peter snorts. Stiles knows why. The alpha thing is an old argument. The pack insists Stiles is their alpha, because he’s the boss. Stiles insists only wolves can be alphas. It goes in circles, every now and then. 

Then Boyd demands, “Show us.”

+

Hallway conference.

“The last thing we need is two new betas with a failing alpha tie to look after,” Peter grumbles. He’s right, is the thing.

Stiles rubs at his temples. “What’s the alternative? We leave them, they either run wild, or the alpha gets them.”

His dad, standing with them, frowns. “What’s going to happen to them?”

Helpfully, Stiles ticks off on his fingers, “Sensory overload, emotional overload, off the scale power surges and a sort of power-high that looks a lot like an acute case of dick-titis. In other words, they’ll either expose themselves, get killed, or end up killing someone.”

He shakes his head. Fuck, but he’s tired and it’s not even dinner time, yet. Which, hey, he hasn’t eaten all day. He makes a mental note. 

“So, new priorities: finding the puppeteer, stopping the hunters, getting the two baby wolves anchored and killing the rogue.” He sighs. “Is anyone else seeing the fingerprints on this?”

“Puppeteer,” Peter agrees, and then grimaces like he’s regretting the term now. Stiles knows how he feels. No-one ever let him name anything again after ‘Dread Doctors’. 

“Why?” the Sheriff asks. He’s looking down the hallway where Scott is talking quietly to Melissa, having rustled her up again. They need her to quietly sign out Erica and Boyd. 

(Not helping them was never an option, discussion on it aside.)

Peter rolls out a low growl, hand settling possessively on Stiles’ waistband. “Wolves harass their prey. Tiring it out as a pack before striking it down. Makes the final kill easier.”

Lovely. “I thought we were sticking with the theory that they didn’t actually want me dead.”

Peter flashes his eyes at that, visibly fighting the urge to throw Stiles over his shoulder and drag him all the way back to New York and safety. His dad, unused to werewolf declarations of love, recoils slightly. 

“They’re definitely trying to run you down. I don’t like it.”

Stiles leans into his partner, because stepping away now would only make Peter’s instincts worse. “Yeah, well,” he says, “neither do I. Now let’s spring our new puppies from the pound and find some grub. I’m starving.”

He pats Peter on the hip, gives him a brief kiss, and then steps away carefully to rustle up the others on his earwig and update them. Also, food.

He has a feeling he’s not going to get any more sleep tonight than he did last night.

+

An hour later finds Scott and the Sheriff back at the station. They’re trying to coordinate the ‘mountain lion’ hunt in a way that will a) leave the Preserve clear for a little after-hours alpha hunt and b) not get anyone else bitten.

Mostly, they plan on doing that by falsifying where Erica and Boyd were attacked and having people wait until tomorrow before they get trigger happy. That gives the pack tonight to get rid of the alpha.

His dad made a very complicated face when Stiles put it like that, but said nothing. Probably because Peter just gave him the cliff notes version of what an alpha without a pack is like not five minutes before that. The words ‘slaughter’, ‘murder’ and ‘rampage’ came up a lot. 

That leaves Stiles and Peter with their two new puppies in tow. Melissa dressed them from the lost and found at the hospital and sent them on their way with a very concise threat on what’s going to happen if someone doesn’t explain everything to her within the week. 

Terrifying. 

Isaac and Alli meet them at Stiles’ old house, stacked high with pizzas. Lydia managed to scrounge up a salad from what she found in the fridge. 

They sit. They eat. They explain to the newbies the ins and outs of wolfy-ism between stuffing their faces. Peter focuses on pack dynamics, Isaac on anchors, Lydia throws in the really useful bits every now and then and Allison catches them up on the dangers they now face. Stiles just watches them for any signs of losing their shit. 

They’re pretty close to the new moon, which is good, because it gives them wiggle room, but Stiles still feels… harassed. Peter picked the right word. Like someone is running him down, running him ragged. He doesn’t like it, especially because it’s working. 

How does he stop that? Stop it working?

Delegate. Spread out. Trust the others. Work as a team. Pack. Whoever is pulling the strings here probably thinks of them like Deaton did: two omegas, a hunter, a banshee, a spark. But they’re pack. A unit. 

They wouldn’t be as good as they are if they weren’t. Use that. Use it hard. Stiles has his father’s lone cowboy tendencies sometimes, he’s aware. The only reason he didn’t leave Lydia behind, too, when he bailed out of this town is that she would have hunted him down and murdered him. Several times. (Literally. She dabbled in necromancy in their late teens.)

He’s not alone, though.

“We need to divide and conquer,” he interrupts Peter’s third time explaining what an alpha is supposed to be.

Silence falls. Stiles chews at his cheek. “No-one out alone, stay on comms. Peter, Isaac, can you focus on Erica and Boyd? We need them anchored. Alli, you and your dad, the Calaveras?” 

She nods immediately. “He texted an hour ago, he’s landed and on his way. Called off the lawyer, too.”

Right. Stiles forgot about that.

“Lyds, you and me, we’re sticking with the Puppeteer. There’s got to be some trace back to them.”

“And the alpha?” Isaac asks, around a slice of pepperoni. 

Stiles shrugs. “Only one guy. We finish dinner, take a nap, and take care of it tonight. Erica, Boyd, I know this is a lot to ask, but are you willing to play bait?”

Erica, who has always been too brave for her own good, nods immediately. Boyd squints at Stiles. “This happened to us because of you, didn’t it?”

Stiles sees no point in lying. “Someone baited us here. Someone set a mad magic user on me, and then framed me for murder to start a war and yeah, they probably corralled the alpha here to mess with me, too. Cause chaos. Tire us out.” He shrugs. “But the attack on you specifically? That was just bad luck. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been some other poor idiot.”

“We didn’t know each other well in school,” Lydia pipes up, “but you’re both smart and you’re strong. You’ll be fine.”

Boyd doesn’t really react to Stiles’ confession, just gives him a long, hard look. Then he nods, just once, and turns back to Peter. “How do we find an anchor?”

+

Stiles sleeps. Or at least he tries to. 

He doesn’t have his man-shaped pillow, so it’s not working out so well. Also, his head is kind of whirring in seventeen different directions at once and not letting him turn it off. So he lies flat on his back in his old bedroom, staring at the ceiling and listening to Peter quietly and competently lead the new wolves through breathing exercises and finding their anchor. 

Lydia is on the phone in the front room, Alli is catching up Chris, who arrived twenty minutes ago. Isaac is quiet. Probably checking the perimeter out of Stiles’ range. Comms are quiet for the moment. His dad and Scott are still out. 

Stiles makes a mental note to get them earwigs, too. He’ll feel better. 

He tries to focus on just Peter’s voice. He knows that Peter is good at this, at being a werewolf, at teaching, because after Isaac joined them, he helped the younger wolf a lot. But this is more still, this is two completely new, frightened, at-sea wolves and Peter is getting through to them, explaining things in just the right way for them to get it. He’s patient and he’s kind and Peter never is any of those things. Not really. 

Stiles thought he’d unlearned how, in the fire. 

But there he is. It’s a glimpse, Stiles thinks, of what Peter was like with a true, functioning, stable pack. One made up of family, not a ragtag bunch of creatures who fit nowhere else. 

He regrets, sometimes, that he and Peter didn’t get a chance to meet before they were both damaged beyond repair. That they never knew each other whole. But then, at other times, he’s glad. Because that way, they don’t have to miss the parts they both lost. 

Still, as he finally, finally, sinks into a shallow kind of sleep, an idea takes told of Stiles. Or rather, a conclusion, a logical solution to a nasty problem. Neat and nicely wrapping up a few loose ends. It takes hold of him, and he lets it.

He lets it. 

+


	2. Thursday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks guys. It's good to know the long wait didn't scare off everyone. :)

+

Thursday

+

It’s exactly three minutes past midnight when Peter sticks his head through the door and Stiles wakes instantly. He doesn’t know when he developed his own kind of spatial awareness just for Peter, but it’s been years and he always, always wakes when Peter comes within range just so he can grab him and pull him in to snuggle. 

Except Peter is wise to his ways and stays well out of reach when he says, “Your puppies are feeling the pull.”

Stiles grunts into his pillow, not feeling even a little refreshed and sits up. “Killing time?”

His wolf’s sharp, razor-edged grin is all the answer he needs. “My dad and Scott back, yet?”

“No. They’re staying at the station tonight, last I heard.”

“Good.”

Standing and putting himself into some semblance of order, Stiles almost misses Peter stepping fully into the room and closing the door. “You don’t want them there.”

“Scott may have known about the supernatural world for years, but he’s not part of it. They don’t know the rules.”

The rules. There are no jails, no juries, no sentences. There is only murder and survival. They won’t try to reason with the alpha, or to trap it, tonight. They will kill it. It’s the entire goal of tonight’s excursion. To kill a living, thinking, _feeling_ creature. Before it kills someone else, sure, but he knows his dad and he knows Scott and life is precious to them in a way it has never been to Stiles, always a bit too callous, a bit too cold toward anyone who wasn’t one of _his_.

He shrugs, a long roll of his shoulders, trying to release the tension built-up there. It doesn’t really work. Too much going on. 

“Chris?”

“With us.”

“Erica and Boyd?” 

He gives up trying to find a clean shirt in the pile of clothes he brought and instead heads for the ten-years-unchanged closet. Pulls out an old favorite, faded black, original, pixelated Pacman munching across the chest. It’s tight in the shoulders and too short, so he shrinks into it, shaking hair out of her face and turning to face Peter.

He has that soft, irritatingly tender smile on his face he sometimes gets. She glares at him. He snorts. “They have anchored on each other. It’s adorable. It also won’t hold through a moon, but for now, this early in the change, they should be fine.”

“Unless the alpha manages to pull them.”

“Unless the alpha manages to pull them.”

They head for the stairs together, Peter stealing a quick grope of Stiles’ ass in those jeans and downstairs, Stiles hugs Chris hello first of all. She likes Chris. He spends his days running Argent Arms, trying to live down his ancestry, and being a really hot Bobby Singer to the decent part of the hunting community. 

The first time he met Peter, he pulled his gun, took off the safety and handed it to Peter, grip first. Would have let him take the shot, too. 

Stiles may be a liar, thief and killer herself, but she appreciates the code of honor Chris lives by. He’s one of the good ones. 

It doesn’t hurt that he’s hot. 

He hugs her back briefly, before Peter has enough and tugs her backwards by her belt loops, growling. Stiles smacks him on the arm, even as she leans into him, her head on his shoulder. “Dude, it’s just Chris.”

Peter growls louder. To his credit, the hunter only rolls his eyes and gets right to it. “We’re hunting alpha?”

“Yes, we are. Any luck with Araya and Gang?”

“I tried to get the message to them that it was a frame job, that someone is using them. I don’t know if it got through. They don’t like me much, south of the border.”

“Thanks for trying anyway.”

He nods and goes to join his daughter in checking over weapons. 

“Stiles?” That’s Erica. Isaac is practically sitting on her and Boyd to keep them on the sofa, but for the moment, the two new puppies look thoroughly distracted from their alpha’s call. They’re staring at Stiles instead. 

Right.

She waves. “Surprise. I’m a part time chick. If you’re confused, Isaac has membership cards.”

“Hey, no fair, bosslady,” he pouts. He also tacks on the ‘lady’ just because that’s usually where he stumbles over pronouns. “You know I don’t give a fuck. I just get confused.”

“Like I said,” she points out, takes two steps away from Peter to rub over his curls, letting him know it’s fun. Well, mostly. Sometimes his fuckery does piss her off. 

It’s Lydia, stepping from the kitchen with what is probably her fifteenth cup of coffee (Stiles is pretty sure she’s the only one who slept, except maybe Alli), who brings the meeting to order. “So, what’s the plan?”

“We let the puppies follow the pull,” Stiles declares, dropping down next to Boyd’s stoic frame, “we circle the alpha. We kill the alpha.”

“That easy?” Boyd asks.

Before anyone can answer, the doorbell rings. Chris opens with a magnum against his thigh and a smile on his face. “Deputies,” he drawls. 

Lydia peeks over his shoulder. “They’re fine,” she declares.

A moment later, Parrish, Scott and an Asian woman in tights and shorts pile into the house. She’s wearing a Zelda t-shirt. Stiles appreciates Scott’s taste in women.

“I thought you were staying at the station?” 

Scott shrugs. “Kira wanted to help. So did we. John said he can deal with stuff alone.”

Stiles takes a moment to get over Scott calling her father ‘John’. It’s weird. Then she bounces to her feet with energy she doesn’t really feel and waves to Kira. “Hi! I’m Stiles. Pleased to meet you, Scott’s totally gaga over you!”

Kira waves back, blushing, and confused. She leans into Scott, not taking her eyes off of Stiles. “I thought you said Stiles was a guy?”

Getting tired of the question, Stiles shifts, just long enough for it to register, before slipping right back into herself. She hasn’t had to deal with this much curiosity over her shape in ever. The pack all found out together and Alli told Chris in advance and no-one else ever really knew. Secret weapon and all that. 

“The t-shirt doesn’t fit guy me anymore,” she declares, exaggeratedly pouting.

Kira cocks her head to one side, studies said shirt. “It’s cool,” she declares. Stiles can see why Scott likes her. She seems awesome.

“You want to help?”

By way of answer, Kira takes a step away from everyone, grabs her belt and pulls… until it comes loose and actually extends into a magnetic sword. 

Really fucking awesome. 

“This is my home. And if there’s a rogue alpha biting people, I’m going to help hunt it down.”

Really, really fucking awesome. 

Blindly, Stiles holds out her fist. Scott bumps it. 

“Fantastic. That means you guys can get Boyd and Erica out safely as soon as we have the bastard.”

Cue indignant arguing from… just about everyone who isn’t part of the usual team. Apparently, they all want to fight.

Lydia rolls her eyes and starts ticking off people. Erica and Boyd, “You’re walking sleepers. Letting you at our backs in a fight would just be plain stupid. Also, you don’t know how to fight.” Kira, “We don’t know how you fight, but this is going to be close quarters. Sword? Not ideal.” Scott. “Human. Gun? Also not ideal.” She finishes on Parrish. “We still don’t actually know what the hell you are. Also, the six of us have fought together. We know how to work with each other. We need this to be quick, clean and safe. Adding variables is the opposite of that.”

Her part said, she nudges under Peter’s arm, leans a little and sips her coffee pointedly until he steal it and drains it. If he weren’t a super wolf, he’d have bags under is eyes as dark as Stiles’ and Lydia’s.

Kira and Scott both nod their agreement, seeing the point. Erica pouts, Boyd consoles her, mouth tight. Parrish takes a mulish step forward. “I can fight. I’m durable.”

“What are you?” Lydia asks, not entirely patient. 

He gives an entirely human growl, frustrated. “I don’t know.”

“So you don’t know whether or not you’re a liability. When was the last time you went up against an alpha werewolf? Never?”

Peter sighs, passes Lydia her cup back and slinks up to the deputy. There’s no other words for it. His hips sway, his shoulders go back, his eyes go half-mast. He leans close to the younger man, sniffs at his neck, letting his nose just barely graze skin. Stiles thinks she sees a quick nip to the ear. Then there’s a single, extended claw, running down Parrish’s jaw, over his Adam’s apple, down to the sweet spot between clavicles.

Peter hums, low and seductive. “Are you sure you don’t know? Such a sweet thing,” he crowds closer, “I’m sure you have an idea, don’t you?” His hips are now snug with Parrish’s, his thigh pressing between the other man’s. 

Stiles bites back a groan. She loves those thighs and this Peter is hot as fuck. Everyone who hasn’t known Peter for years looks scandalized and a little freaked out. Parrish tries to step backward, but Peter follows, still aggressively teasing and crooning sweet nothings. He’s about two seconds away from serious bad-touch territory when the deputy finally has enough and, with a snarl, shoves Peter hard enough to send him skidding into the back of an armchair. 

His eyes are a bright orange, and he’s growling low around a set of impressive fangs. 

Peter rights himself, puts away the claws and asks, “What has orange eyes, a canine set of fangs and smells of brimstone when it gets angry?”

Isaac, head cocked to one side, adds, “Not just brimstone. Something else. Like Lyds, almost.”

Banshee? No. Not the same. Almost. Stiles chews her lip. “Fae?”

“Hellhound,” Lydia concludes. Frowns. “Were you in a bad accident of some sort at any point in your life?”

Parrish, still visibly reeling from what just happened, straightens, tugging at his uniform. Under the anger and disgust, he smells faintly of sex. Just enough that Stiles’ relatively dull senses can pick it up. His eyes go back to normal, the fangs recede. He sends Peter a scathing glare. “Do that again and I’ll taze you.”

“No need. I got what I wanted,” Peter informs him, back to being his usual smarmy self, instead of the rapey-smarmy self. Allison helpfully whacks him on the back of the head for being a dick. He sticks his tongue out at her. She sticks hers out, too. Chris looks pained. 

“Accident?” Lydia prompts.

“I almost died on my last tour in Iraq. IED. What does that have to do with it?”

She sniffs daintily. “Hellhounds are a type of fae, but they’re spirits. They have no corporeal bodies so they take the bodies of the dead. You’re basically a meat suit. Soul suit, too, so you probably aren’t aware. Do you have blackouts?”

“Oh, Christ, and you say I’m the tactless one,” Stiles complains, mostly because Parrish is visibly freaking out. Who wouldn’t, when a stranger tells you that you’re dead and being used as the sock puppet of some creature of lore? Although, Stiles notes, he’s not denying, which is telling. Some part always knows what lurks beneath. She turns to the man. “We don’t have to go over this now. Peter was being an asshole, but he was making a point. Beyond figuring out what you are. You’re definitely a predator. You’re aggressive and, Lydia’s point stands, _you don’t know how to work with us_. So look after the bait, let us do the dirty work and in exchange, we can help you find out more about what you are, if you want us to.”

He ignores her. “What do the blackouts mean?”

Lydia shrugs. “There is literally a separate entity inside of you. People talk about shapeshifters being two-natured, but they’re not really. You are, though. The blackouts are when the hound takes over.”

Scott puts a hand on his colleague’s (friend’s?) shoulder and complains, “We have been trying to figure this out for years. How can you be sure?”

“We met one once,” Alli pipes up, shuddering at the memory. “It was centuries old and a former Nazi and it spent most of its time as lava statue, so the parallels aren’t that obvious, but Lydia and Stiles researched a lot, afterwards.”

That thing was fucking creepy. Also, Nazi. 

Parrish ignores the byplay. “Is it… am I… evil?”

“Dangerous,” Lyds corrects, finally softening a little. She sounds almost gentle now. Or as close as she ever gets. “Not evil. Just dangerous. Let’s deal with this mess, and then we can try to help you, okay?”

Parrish considers for a moment, then nods. His expression is still tight and unhappy but he nods. 

“Good,” Boyd says into the ensuing pause, holding up his left hand, brand new claws embedded in the palm, blood running down his wrist, “because we really should go. It’s getting stronger. And angrier.”

+

Stiles can tell the cop contingent of their little group doesn’t like the plan and that Kira, too, is worried about the lack of detail, but the six of them have this. 

They don’t have time for anything fancy, so it’s just going to be straight-up murder. Not that they’re saying that out loud. Stiles has a feeling, deep down, in her weary bones, that things aren’t going to stop piling up after this. 

Two new betas to get under control, hunters and the mysterious shit stirrer behind the scenes are far from all that’s coming their way. Call it a hunch, call it an educated guess, but at this point, Peter’s harassment theory is looking like a fact. 

Erica and Boyd stumble ahead of the group, almost blindly moving through the woods, their vision not changed enough to see in the dead of night. The moon’s only a bone sliver hidden behind the trees, not helping at all. Erica keeps tripping over roots and catching herself in impossibly graceful moves while Boyd prowls but keeps his hands extended at waist height in case of obstacles. It’s a little terrifying to watch them stumble-hunt for the alpha that made them. They all worry if their anchors will hold, if they’ll manage to get them away from their alpha in time to avoid a bond. No-one wants to kill the two for the crime of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Hell, if Stiles weren’t in this town, he’s pretty sure the alpha wouldn’t be either. She’ll feel guilty about that. Later. When they’re survived this shit show. 

Stiles is keeping close to Peter for his better night vision while Isaac is outright carrying Lydia on his back. She has no enhanced senses to speak off, this is an old routine. Kira is leading Scott by the hand, the two of them randomly beaming at each other. The supernatural secret being out between them seems to be good for them. Parrish trails after, doing fine on his own. 

The same goes for Chris and Alli, who, being the super hunters they are, move confidently, if a little slowly, through the dark. They bring up the rear, weapons at the ready. 

All in all, they’re not particularly quiet, but a rogue alpha is only going to see it as a challenge, rather than a danger. It won’t run from them and that’s all they need.

They’ve been hiking through the preserve for over half an hour when Erica suddenly speeds up. Boyd manages to hold on long enough to hiss, “Close,” before he kicks into gear, too. 

Stiles looks at their designated beta-wranglers. “Grab them and hoof it. They should stop fighting you as soon as the pull’s gone.”

Three nods. Lydia slides down Isaac’s back and starts flexing her hands, getting ready to throw sonic blasts around. Without another word exchanged, they all speed up their steps. 

The puppies have stopped in a clearing a little ahead, and there is the alpha, a monstrous thing, nine feet tall at least, darkly furred, hunch-backed and grotesque. Lost in the creature side. Stiles and Peter flank right, Isaac and the Argents go left. Lydia plugs the path Erica and Boyd carved into the clearing, Scott, Kira and Parrish behind her. 

She’ll give them their cue. 

Stiles shifts back to his male form simply for the extra two inches of reach and extends his claws, fighting the urge to admire them. They’re so goddamn pretty. 

Erica is whining, Boyd is cowering, the alpha is growling at them both, claws extended towards them, beckoning them. This close, the pulls it’s exerting is almost a physical thing, a drag of weight on their backs, even to Stiles. Peter is visibly holding in a growl, despite already being in beta shift. Stiles heard only bits and pieces of Peter and Isaac training the new wolves, but he suspects Peter likes them. Erica’s snark, at least, is right up his alley. 

Finally, everyone’s in position and Alli fires two arrows right at the alpha’s feet, forcing it back, away from Erica and Boyd. They’re the flashbang kind and Stiles closes his eyes in time to avoid the agony. 

The three wolves in the clearing don’t manage and that’s when Kira and Parrish surge past Lydia to grab a beta each. Kira grabs Erica, Parrish Boyd and they haul them, confused, howling and struggling, backwards, away from the alpha. 

It roars defiance and Lydia lets a scream loose just as it gets ready to lunge, slamming it into an old oak at the edge of the clearing. Stiles paces the betas and the second they’re all back in the treeline, he surges forward, Peter following suit, Isaac mirroring him. They others are moving, too, but Stiles only needs the wolves in the clearing to lay a delicate ring of mountain ash around the whole thing, trapping the alpha inside with them and the betas outside, away from any chance to interfere. 

He’s vaguely aware of Scott speaking in low urgent tones and the racket from Erica and the growling from Boyd receding a little, but it doesn’t matter now. 

The alpha tries to fling itself after its pack again, and this time, Lydia doesn’t bother throwing it back, just lets it slam itself into the barrier. Then Isaac and Peter seize their chance and attack from two sides while it’s still reeling. 

Isaac goes high, Peter low, the way they’ve done a hundred times, and when their prey surges backwards, hurt and enraged but already healing, Alli is there with her arrows and Chris gets off a few shots with his Magnum. 

Wolfsbane, all of it. 

It roars, loud and full of rage and Erica and Boyd howl in response, trapped in the thrall, hungry for blood. Stiles feels them push against his barrier from the outside and joins Issac on his next attack, both of them going for the hamstrings and knees, where they can do maximum damage in the shortest time.

The alpha goes down on one knee, gets in a good swipe at Isaac and yanks an arrow free of its shoulder. Stiles finishes his move in an ungainly roll, comes up in time to see Peter backhanded into the barrier. 

“Motherfucker,” Stiles snarls, as he hears something break. 

Lydia screams, buying the three inside the circle a few extra seconds. Alli fires again and misses. Chris isn’t firing anymore. The risk of hitting pack is too high now. 

Stiles is, thanks to his flailing, behind the alpha, but he knows he won’t be able to stay there. It won’t let him. As soon as it recovers, it’ll come at him. So he doesn’t give it time. He flings a fistful of fire at its broad, deformed back and as it rears back in pain, he slams into it in a picture perfect tackle, taking it down. 

He gets knees on its burning back and tries to grab its arms to haul back, only to get a set of claws straight into the meaty part of his thigh. 

The pain almost makes him let go, but at the last second, Isaac is there, wrenching the claws free and breaking the arm they’re attached to in a twist, hauling it back and almost overhead. 

Their eyes meet for half a second and from Isaac’s fanged smirk, Stiles can tell they’re thinking the same thing. 

Stiles manages to get the second arm under control and with Isaac’s added weight, manages to keep the alpha down. For now. 

He gives them thirty seconds before its accelerated healing ends with Isaac and Stiles both bleeding profusely. Possibly dead. 

But not yet. Idea. Conclusion. Solution.

“This scarf is fucking Versace, I’m not ruining it with blood,” Isaac declares, which is his way of confirming what Stiles already knew, what all of them know. Isaac has no desire to be alpha. He winks at Stiles and yeah, they’re definitely all thinking the same thing.

Stiles grins back, tastes blood and hollers at his wolf, who is finally getting back on his legs after whatever he broke in that fall, “Peter, get your ass over here already! Now!”

Peter starts moving almost automatically before taking in the scene, a sly smirk spreading across his features. He, too, is on the same page. No reason to let all that power go to waste. Not when they have such a neat use for it. Still, Stiles helpfully passes the alpha’s second arm to Isaac and yanks up its head, riding a particularly vicious buck and nailing it in the kidneys with the full length of his claws just to buy a few more seconds. Shredded kidneys are a bad thing, even for alpha werewolves.

“Do it!” Lydia shouts, adding her own blessing.

“Now!” Allison adds and that’s all Peter needs, pack’s permissions, pack’s endorsement, pack’s backing, because a second later, his claws are slicing across the alpha’s exposed throat. He roars, grabbing the head from Stiles and twisting it clean off, flinging it aside just as the power floods him and the packbonds light up like fireworks. 

His eyes bleed scarlet and he throws his head back and _roars_ , hard enough for Stiles to feel it down to the marrow of his bones. Isaac joins in without hesitation, a moment later copied by Boyd and then Erica. 

Stiles lets himself be pulled along and adds his human warble to the choir. He’s pretty sure Alli does as well, before Lydia lets loose a screech that renders them all momentarily deaf. 

And just like that, Peter is an alpha. 

The woods around them are silent, not a cricket chirping, not a fox moving. The entirety of the preserve is holding its breath. 

Then Erica and Boyd, driven purely by instinct and, perhaps relief to not be bound to something mindless and feral, slink up to Peter, necks bared and eyes flashing brightly, the second Stiles lets the barrier drop.

He touches them briefly, a hand to each other their necks, no more than that. Not until they’re in their right minds and can choose, Stiles knows. Despite what he pulled with Parrish earlier, Peter is big on consent. 

Isaac is next, no hesitation, a grin around his fangs. He flashes blue at Peter, gets a flash of red and a growl back and then they’re both at each other’s necks, scenting and scent marking for all they’re worth. Pack. True pack. 

Lydia comes after, Alli joining her halfway and the two of them smack into Peter together, hugging him tight as he presses a single, chaste and entirely human kiss to each of their pulse points before hugging them back, his face shining with naked gratitude and incredulous joy. Like he didn’t think they would. Isaac, yes, because he submitted to Peter long ago, Stiles, yes, because it’s Stiles, but the girls? 

He and Allison are fashion accomplices and Lydia likes to drag him to whatever sundrenched European café she can find on a job because Peter is the best at judging tourists with her, judging them hard and Stiles realizes, in that moment, that Peter never let himself think about what any of that _means_. 

He was alone for so long after the fire and he didn’t dare hope for more than he already had. He was Stiles’ hanger-on, first, and Stiles doesn’t think he quite noticed that he hasn’t been that for years. He’s Peter. And they love him. It’s not pragmatism that made them endorse Peter, not practicality. It’s love. Peter doesn’t quite know how to expect love anymore, Stiles thinks. 

The girls part when Stiles approaches and there is none of his previous careful demeanor in Peter as he grabs him by the hips and hauls him in for a kiss that’s more teeth than lips, more animal than human, claws tickling at the small of his back, claiming, claiming, claiming. 

Peter moves them, sideways and back until Stiles’ back hits a tree, making Stiles gasp as he winds his legs around his wolf’s – his alpha’s – waist and all he can see is red, all he can feel is Peter and -

“They’re going to stop, right?” That’s Scott, sounding a little squeaky.

“Previous experience says no,” Chris, of all people, answers dryly, sounding a little put-out. 

“It’s a wolf thing,” Isaac supplies, helpfully, and Stiles grabs at Peter’s hair and yanks his head back enough to free his mouth. When Peter snarls and pulls against his hold immediately, he simply directs him toward his throat. He’s going to have so many hickeys tomorrow. 

“If you don’t like it,” he snaps at their audience, “don’t fucking watch.”

“There’s a dead body right there!” Scott sounds so scandalized. It’s adorable.

“We’ve fucked next to worse,” Stiles snaps, then orders, “Avert your eyes!” And lets Peter’s hair go in favor of using his hands on the other man’s belt. 

Scott squeaks. One of the girls (Erica?) makes a happy noise. Stiles emphatically does. Not. Care. Peter is rampant with instinct, hotter than hell and Stiles is going to get fucked. Right here. Right now. Right – 

“Animals!” A voice spits, and it’s a new voice, accented and bitterangryhateful and just like that, Stiles has his feet back under him, Peter crouched in front of him, snarling with his shiny, red, red eyes, the pack closing rank. Even Erica and Boyd, unsure but willing, flank the loose formation. Kira pulls Scott away from the newcomers. Only Chris holds his ground, Parrish few steps behind him. 

“Senora Calavera,” he greets, mostly, Stiles figures, for their benefit. 

Araya sneers as she steps fully into the clearing, half a dozen heavily armed, angry hunters at her back. She studies the alpha’s corpse for a moment, reverted into a middle-aged man with freckles and coarse, red chest hair. Then she kicks it and spits on it. 

Peter growls low in warning. Species sympathy outweighs personal feelings every time. 

“I called you,” Chris continues, like this is a casual conversation. 

Araya sneers. “Yes. Asking me not to come and hunt the one who killed three of my men, my mijo among them.” She glares at Stiles with laser focus while she says it, dismissing Chris entirely. For an old lady, she sure packs a lot of hate. 

And by the timing of her appearance, she hung around in the wings, waiting for the outcome. Why fight everyone, when you can just pick off the exhausted survivors afterward? For her, killing them all would be nothing more than exterminating vermin.

Stiles puts a hand on Peter’s shoulder, moving up to stand beside, instead of behind. A snarl shows Peter’s displeasure. Alpha instincts. Stiles digs fingers into the meat of his shoulder. Peter is not the boss of him. Alpha, yes, but not boss. On the human side of the equation, Stiles is the boss of Peter. They’re partners. Equals.

“If you know what Chris had to say, you also know that I had nothing to do with Enrico’s and the other two deaths. I’m sorry, I don’t know their names.” He figures a little respect for the dead might not go amiss. “I was framed for this very reason. Someone wants you to do their dirty work for them, to run me down.” He straightens to his full height, tries to stuff down the exhaustion of the past few days and the babble that threatens to erupt and asks, plainly, “Are you going to be someone else’s tool like that?”

“Pretty words from a pretty monster,” Araya sneers. “Three of mine are dead and someone must pay. If this is a trap, it’s for you. So you are the reason they’re dead.”

“No,” Allison fires back before Stiles can, straight and unafraid, arrow notched and ready. “Stiles is no more responsible for the actions of your grandson’s murderer than you are. After all, your reputation is what made your hunters such good bait to begin with. Blame will get us nowhere.”

“No laws have been broken by anyone here,” Lydia continues. “We’re monsters by your definition, but we do not do monstrous things.”

Not always. Not if they can help it. And not in this town.

“The alpha was rogue and we dealt with him. His betas are under control. We have harmed no humans and made no move to harm any of yours. And hey,” Stiles offers, “when we find out who’s behind all this, I’ll punch them in the face for you, if you want.”

Araya purses her lips, displeasure radiating from her. One of her men, in his late forties maybe, with a wicked scar down one forearm, steps up to her, whispering in rapid-fire Spanish. Stiles catches maybe every fifth word, if that. Romance languages confuse him.

Without a single word spoken between them, the pack gears up for a fight, muscles tensing, weapons rising. Stiles hears Lydia take a deep breath, feels Peter surge forward in his own skin. He’ll shift into full wolf in three seconds flat, if the hunters attack now. Stiles himself calls fire, lets it bleed into his clenched hands, his eyes. 

They glow gold like this, like molten lava. He can’t disguise that, doesn’t try to. Let the hunters see. Let them see them, right here, tense and ready and unmoving. They won’t start this fight, but they will not be easy prey. 

None of them. 

“Senora?” Chris finally asks, just as tense as the rest of them.

Araya snarls, or as close to it as a human can get. “Have it your way, Argent,” she snaps, at Chris alone. Not anyone else. Apparently, they’re all beneath her notice. “No blood will be shed tonight. But we’ll be here and we’ll be watching. One toe out of line, and my boys will string them all up like the animals they are.”

She spits at Chris’ feet for emphasis, kicks the corpse’s head off into the trees and then the Calaveras are gone as suddenly as they arrived. 

Stiles counts to sixty in his head, then relaxes, giving his crotch a pitiful look. “Well, that ruined the mood.”

“Too easy,” Alli complains as she puts away her arrow, but leaves her bow out and ready. 

Peter growls, low and angry, visibly struggling to reel in his ramped-up instincts. This is his territory now, these are his people, and both were just threatened. Stiles steps up to him, molds himself along his back and whispers, “Let it go. They’re gone for now and we’re safe. All of us. Isaac, Allison, Lydia, even Boyd and Erica, Chris and me. We’re all safe. The alpha is dead, the hunters are in creepy stalker mode and for tonight, it’s over. Let it go, Peter.”

A few feet away, Isaac starts humming that fucking song. 

It’s that, probably, as much as Stiles’ reassurance and steady heartbeat, that finally shakes Peter out of it. If Isaac is being a shit, then everything’s fine. 

He flips the younger wolf off, gets a delighted laugh. “Fuck you, too, alpha!”

Stiles rolls his eyes and straightens both himself and Peter out, noticing for the first time that his jeans are burnt away at the knees and his shirt’s ruined, too. He gives it a mournful look. 

Kira, apparently following his gaze, gives a little gasp. “Oh, Geez, Stiles. Are you burnt?”

Stiles shakes his head. “Nah. Fire can’t hurt me.”

She gives a little giggle, quotes, “Fire cannot kill a dragon,” and it’s only a joke, he can tell by her expression, but he kind of freezes and, of course, Scott is there and Scott reads him better than Stiles ever gave him credit for. 

“Oh my god, is that why Deaton wanted you?”

Kira gapes. Parrish looks… still angry, mostly. 

“It’s why everyone wants me, apparently. I’m, like, a dying breed or something. Even though I’m only a halfblood.”

“Your mom?” 

He nods. 

“The Sheriff doesn’t know.” That’s Parrish, lips pursed. 

Stiles jerks around to give him the stink eye. “No. And you’re not going to be the one to tell him because there’s about seventeen tons of baggage attached to that bombshell.” 

Lydia doesn’t let it devolve into a fight, grabs the deputy by his arm and says, “If you bring me coffee in the morning, I’ll let you look at our bestiary entry for hell hounds.” Then she uses her hold on him to drag him toward the cars because it’s almost three am now, and shit, but it’s been a long day. And it’s barely even started, really.

Scott shrugs and he and Kira trail after, followed by Team Argent and their werewolf fanboy. Erica and Boyd linger, unsure, shooting looks at both Peter and Stiles. Alpha and, “Really? You’re a dragon?”

Stiles gives a little mock bow, tipped hat and all. “Keep it on the DL?”

“Do you live together?” That’s Peter, grabbing Stiles by the hand and tugging him forward. 

They both nod. 

“Go home. Sleep. You have our numbers if you need anything. With a bite wound like yours, a human would be out of work for at least a week, so be careful who sees you and come by the house tomorrow. We’ll plan then.”

They nods again, accepting his orders easily and then they all trek back toward civilization quietly.

+

The doorbell rings at eight in the morning and Stiles, ten years out of practice at reacting to the sound, barely twitches until someone knees him in the back with a growled, “Make it stop.”

He kicks back, grumbles and tries to go back to sleep. Only to belatedly realize that a) that was Isaac and b) he’s pretty sure that’s the chill morning breeze he’s feeling on his bare ass. 

He cracks one eye open and, yup, the entire brood had somehow migrated into his old bed in the few hours since he and Peter finally fell asleep. He’s half lying on Peter, with Lydia plastered along his back. Her silk nighty feels really awesome against his skin. Allison has taken Peter’s other side. Isaac is sort of bent in half, wrapped around her legs and belly, his own legs tangling all over the rest of them. Both of them are wearing briefs and nothing else. It’s hot. In multiple senses of the word. It’s also very confusing, limb wise. And Stiles is buck naked. 

Oh well. They’ve seen it all before. 

But now that his brain is – unwillingly and far too early – booted, he realizes that the sound he heard was really the doorbell and he should answer it. He manages to sit up with only a sleepy protest from Lydia and scoots down until he can slip off the end of the bed. When he looks back, narrowed red eyes meet his. He shoots his wolf a lopsided smile and grabs the first pair of pants he finds. Not his, of course, so he trips over them half a dozen times on his way down the stairs. Peter is broader in the hips than Stiles. At least boy Stiles. 

And he can’t really change because being topless in girl shape is frowned upon. Stupid gender norms. 

He can sort of feel who’s on the other side of the door before he opens it. Erica and Boyd aren’t really a surprise. If the newly strengthened pack bonds have dragged everyone into Stiles and Peter’s bed, they probably drew the two newbies all the way from across town. 

He grunts a greeting at their tired, wan faces, nods approvingly at the fact that they’re about as dressed as he is in sweats and hoodies, and then turns on his heel to reclaim his spot. 

… “Mine,” he mutters, petulantly, when he finds Lydia has already taken it over. 

“Warm,” she counters, because before her first cup of coffee, even Lydia Freaking Martin goes a bit less verbose. 

“I’ll put on boxers if you give me back my spot,” he argues.

“No.”

Bitch. 

Well, she brought it on herself. He kicks off Peter’s jeans and climbs, buck naked, into bed behind her, plasters himself along her back and wiggles a hand under her belly. She kicks at him, but doesn’t move. 

“Uhm.”

“Pull up some bed. Sleep,” Stiles orders because, yes, there are five adults in this bed, two of which are naked, and all of them are cuddling and yes, that’s weird. But only if you’re thinking like a human and no-one here really is. Except Alli. But she’s a slightly psychotic Disney princess, which totally counts. 

“Uhm.”

“It’s bonding,” Peter growls, voice box not entirely human. “Get in, or take the couch downstairs.”

Stiles, his hand between Lydia and Peter, feels the alpha tense. It’s a weird situation. Their animal sides want their new pack mates close, but the humans are paranoid, don’t want to let virtual strangers this close to their soft bellies. 

“You’re naked,” Boyd eventually points out. 

“’s cause they’re fucking exhibitionists,” Isaac complains around a yawn.

Allison finally introduces herself to the conversation by smacking Stiles on the shoulder and kicking at her boyfriend. “If you’re talking, go make me some breakfast.”

“Actually,” a new voice says from the doorway, behind the puppies, “there’s not enough to go around. I’m going to find a bakery.”

Chris is a god among men. His daughter seems to think so, too, because she sits up and beams at him. He makes a strangled noise because she’s topless. Oh, well. “Croissants, please. And something with chocolate. There’s a place on Main that’s pretty awesome.”

“Josie’s,” Lydia supplies.

“Josie’s. Noted. The Sheriff called from the station, he’s coming over with news. So please, put some fucking clothes on?”

And then he’s gone. Stiles sighs.

“There goes the morning,” rolls back to his feet and goes to grab some clothes that actually fit him while shooing the puppies out of the room. He needs a toothbrush. Stat.

+

Twenty minutes later, Stiles stumbles into the tail-end of Allison’s explanation of why clothing is optional in this pack.

“And anyway, the boys ruin their clothes faster than you can say ‘duck’ and us girls are too hot to cover up.”

Erica giggles. “Which category does Stiles fall into?”

“Both.”

“Huh?”

“Yep. He destroys 48% more clothes when he’s a guy than when he’s a girl. Lydia has charts and everything. It’s a mystery.”

“I still maintain that she’s falsifying data,” Stiles pipes up as he fixes his and Peter’s coffees and snags a croissant from the bag Chris plopped down on the table before Alli can hoard them all. Peter strolls into the kitchen just then and grabs his mug from Stiles with a brief kiss of thanks. Stiles beams at him and tries to find a bit of open counter space to sit on and notices his father for the first time. 

“Oh, hey, morning, Dad.”

The Sheriff is leaning by the fridge, clutching his own coffee like a lifeline. He looks wrecked. Which, considering the spent the past two nights at the station and had several bombshells dropped on him in between, is not a surprise. The man has always worked like that. He reacts to bad news with anger, then shoves it down and chews on it, slowly, for the next few days. This is him, chewing on the fact that his son kept all kinds of dangerous, deadly secrets, is a magical creature and also, a criminal. 

But until he’s done working through it all, until he’s come to some conclusion, some judgement, he’ll not say a word about it. Instead, “Hey, kid. I hear you still manage to lose your clothes at the drop of a hat?”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Oh my god, Dad. I got over my naked phase about twenty-five years ago!”

“That’s not what I’m hearing.”

“Naked Stiles,” Isaac confirms as he stumbles in last, steered by Lydia, who is the only one who takes pity on him when he’s like this in the mornings. “So much naked Stiles. And naked Peter. And naked Peter and Stiles and – “

Peter growls. It’s low and sends a shiver down Stiles’ spine and makes Isaac’s jaw clamp shut like it’s remote controlled. There is a pause. Then the beta snaps his teeth. “No fair, man. You can’t use the alpha to gag me.”

When Peter just flashes red eyes but doesn’t argue beyond that, he adds, “Use it to gag Stiles instead, he likes it.”

Everyone’s groans. Peter growls again, but this time apparently without the added alpha power, because Isaac keeps grinning, unrepentant, as he plops into his father-in-law’s lap and steals his girlfriend’s coffee. 

Chris, mercifully, waits until the cup is empty before dumping him on the floor. 

Stiles ignores the entire byplay. “Any news from the station?”

“Oh, yeah. And you’re not gonna like it.”

Lydia makes an inquiring noise from where she’s putting on a new pot of coffee. 

“We identified the other victims.” The Sheriff rubs a hand over his face. “We used Enrico Calavera as a starting point and found José and Ana Sanchez. They were a married couple. All three of them crossed over into Mexico three weeks ago and then stumbled into FBI surveillance when they bought weapons from a small time arms dealer they were watching.”

Well. Fuck. Stiles can tell where this is going.

“The arms dealer was probably a hunter,” Chris pipes up. Argent Arms is clean, a legitimate business with big time contracts, but not all hunters work so hard to keep things above board. Crossing borders further muddies up the waters. 

The Sheriff shrugs. “The FBI put a loose tail on them and focused on the dealer. Five days later, a mutilated body turned up outside Baton Rouge, with a silver bullet in its skull, matching one of the weapons they bought. They disappeared and then reappeared in California at an ATM six days ago. Then, yesterday, the warehouse.”

“Lots of charges, lots of state lines,” Lydia supplies, watching the coffee drip. “The FBI has taken over the case. Seattle or Los Angeles field office?” Seattle is closer, but it’s also another state. 

“Los Angeles. I’ve convinced them that the sloppy frame job was meant to distract me, not harm Stiles, but they still want to talk to him. And first thing this morning, they collected everything we had and shipped it out to LA.”

“Fuck,” Alli mutters. “We wanted to get at Deaton’s stuff today.”

“We did?” Stiles frowns.

“We wanted to look through his things, Stiles, remember?” Lydia cajoles. “And his magical paraphernalia – “

“The wards,” Stiles realizes. He’d forgotten all about them.

“You lost me,” Isaac informs them. The other puppies nod along. Half of this conversation is probably gibberish to them. 

“Deaton kept everything magical or sensitive in a warded trunk in his office. Stiles and I saw him work it when we were kids. If anyone tries to tamper with the wards, the contents of the trunk get destroyed as a failsafe. If we want to get at whatever he knew, or might have known, we need the ward key.”

“Which is what?”

“Probably something innocuous. He carried it with him at all times, we know that much, but we don’t know what it looks like,” Stiles adds. And gets to the point, “So we need whatever you found on his body to get at his stuff and maybe, finally, find a link to the Puppeteer.”

His dad groans. “And you couldn’t have mentioned that yesterday?”

“Well, pardon us, for not thinking of it after being drugged and kidnapped, arrested for murder and then having to deal with rogue fucking alpha. We didn’t exactly expect the FBI to come calling.”

“They don’t usually move this fast,” Peter offers, consolingly.

“They do if the name of a major drug cartel is involved.”

At this point, Stiles is feeling distinctly harassed. 

“For all we know,” Chris says, reading Stiles’ thoughts, “this could be another ploy to spread us even thinner.”

“It sure is convenient that the bodies Stiles supposedly killed ended up already being on the FBI’s radar,” Boyd finally enters the conversation with. Then frowns. “I feel like my life has become a heist movie overnight.”

Stiles snorts. “Dude. Heist movies can suck it. This is so much weirder.”

“I’ll try to get a foot back in the door. Deaton was local, which should get me at least some cooperation. Maybe Parrish or Scott can –“

Stiles cuts him off with a flapped hand. “Too slow. Alli, Isaac, how do you feel about catching up with our old friend, Theo?”

Isaac’s grin is sharkish. “You mean the one currently hanging out in LA?”

Alli leans forward, smirking, “Theo, the coyote burglar?”

Lydia snorts. “He hates when you call him that.”

“He’s mostly coyote, no feline in sight. He’s not a cat burglar.”

“Wouldn’t chimera burglar be more appropriate?” Stiles prompts.

“Dread Doctors,” Peter reminds, kicking at his ankle. Right. Stiles doesn’t get to name things anymore. But it’s a little funny that the last thing he got to name, was the thing that introduced them to Theo. Because at the end of that particular cluster fuck, the pack and Theo were the last ones standing. They’re friends now. He’s helped them pull a few jobs in Italy and Spain year before last. 

He’s a dick, but a lovable one and god knows, they’re all that. 

“Can you at least pretend all your friends are not criminals around me?” The Sheriff looks pained. “Or that you’re planning on breaking into the FBI?”

“Only a field office,” Stiles consoles, because it’s the best option out of all the things he wants to say. Among the less ideal options are _you never cared what I do before this_ , _at least it’s to save lives and not for fun_ and _hey, at least it’s not multiple murder, yay_. In this point they have always been polar opposites: the Sheriff needs time to chew through his anger, to let it simmer down. Stiles, when given time and rage, only festers.

Alli holds up a hand, fingers a hair apart. “Only a little.”

Chris shakes his head at their shenanigans. “I’m coming with you. Shouldn’t take more than three days, I think?”

“Two, if we give Theo a chance to prepare,” Lydia counters, already pulling out her phone and dialing as she slips from the room. 

“What about us?” Erica asks.

Stiles shrugs. “Keep working on the wolfy stuff with Peter. Lyds and I will stick to research. We should probably try to set up a patrol system of some sort, too. I have this feeling that the shit’s just going to come raining down.” He grimaces at the mental image he just gave himself, then shrugs again. “Not a lot we can do. Right now, someone else is calling the shots.”

Peter growls in clear frustration, eyes flashing murderous red. 

Yeah. That about covers it.

+

The rest of the morning goes slow. For what feels like the first time in ages, they actually have breathing room. 

…and none of them appreciate it, because they’re all painfully aware that it’s the ‘calm before the storm’ kind of breathing room. 

Isaac and the girls set up a conference call with Theo at the kitchen table once the Sheriff has gone to bed, and start plotting. Theo, thankfully, is all for robbing the FBI, and drops the other small time job he was working on like yesterday’s garbage to come play in their sandbox. Chris hangs out, mostly to glower in the background when the chimera gets too douche-y, which happens about every seven minutes. Stiles timed it once. It’s like Theo’s physically incapable of not being a total jerkwad for longer than that. But then he was raised by psychopathic immortal scientists in a lab, so slack must be cut. 

Peter grabs the puppies and starts doing arcane werewolf things in the living room with them. 

Stiles hangs between the two groups and wonders if it would be okay for him to just go back to sleep.

Eventually, a tired looking Scott relieves him of his dilemma by rolling up in a squad car to accompany Stiles to the station, where Special Agent So and So is waiting to take his statement. 

Yippy!

“And afterwards we could, I mean, if it’s cool with you, have lunch? With Kira? She’d really like to meet you. You know, without… uhm, death and murder and werewolves?”

Because apparently Scott told his girlfriend all about Stiles. As if Stiles weren’t already feeling guilty enough about being a shit stain off a friend to Scott for the past, oh, ten years or so?

“Sure, buddy. Sure. Just let me find some clothes first. It’s probably better if I don’t show up at the FBI looking like a hobo.”

The interview goes the way these things always do. Stiles has made an illustrious career out of giving law enforcement agents the runaround while seeming perfectly guileless and helpful. It started with his father and the Case of the Empty Cookie Jar and never really stopped. Murder One, no sir, I was nowhere near that place and the DNA you found is female, didn’t you say? Diamond heist? Why, I have no idea what might have happened there. Explosives were used, you say? I don’t much like loud noises.

Special Agent Pratik seems nice enough. He’s got a receding hairline, a little paunch, clever eyes and absolutely no chance of figuring out the case because he’s missing key ingredients, such as the supernatural, hunters and a vengeful nogitsune ripping up one of the victims. He is aware that Stiles does not own the murder weapon, that three of the victims did not die at the same time as the fourth and that he is missing pieces, though. 

It’s enough to turn the interview into little more than a polite non-exchange of information and then Stiles is officially exonerated. 

Pratik packs himself back off to LA, where Theo is hopefully already casing the evidence locker they need to break into, and Stiles is free to rap his knuckles on Scott’s desk.

“Lunch?”

“Yeah. Dude, that was fast!”

Stiles, not wanting to say too much in a police station, just smiles tightly. “I had nothing to hide.”

It’s a big, bold lie, but Scott is distracted by looking for his keys and misses most of it. They take his cruiser and head for the same diner they met in only a few short days ago. Kira meets them there, kisses Scott hello and waves shyly at Stiles.

“Hi, again! I hope you don’t mind, but I thought it’d be nice to meet without all the,” she makes a few grand gestures with both hands, almost smacking Scott in the face, “and the,” more gesturing, “going on and just talk? Scott has told me so much about you and now that I know that he knows and you know, we can all…. Uhm, know together?” She blushes. 

Stiles grins at her and holds out his hand, palm up and Kira gives an embarrassed little giggle as she brushes her fingertips against his, briefly. 

Scott makes an inquisitive noise, watching them. Stiles nudges him along toward a booth and explains under his breath, “For a lot of supernaturals, scent is a pretty big thing. Shaking hands, fully touching, palm to palm, transfers a lot of scent. It’s considered impolite. But I guess human customs snuck in at some point, so now it’s brushing fingertips as a compromise.”

“It’s also a sort of polite, covert way of letting someone know that you’re supernatural and aware that they are, too,” Kira pipes up, getting over her brief bout of embarrassment. Stiles really likes her. 

“Like a secret handshake?”

“Like a secret handshake,” Stiles confirms, slips into one side of the booth, leaving the other for the lovebirds. He sends the dark-haired lurker that followed him since the station a little wave and a bright, insincere smile.

Kira turns to follow his gaze, her jaw setting into something tight and angry. “Hunters?”

“Just the one,” Stiles consoles. “Making sure I don’t randomly start brutally murdering innocent bystanders, thus giving him an excuse to, in turn, brutally murder me and everyone I know. You know how it goes.” He tags a little bland smirk onto his words just as their waitress ambles over. 

She looks harassed and grumpy, probably forced to pick up Erica’s shifts, in addition to her own. They all take pity on her and order quickly and without a fuss. Once she’s gone, Scott frowns at them. “Should I make him go away?”

“Nah. Not much point. They’d just send someone else. Ignore him. That’ll piss him off more.” Pointedly, Stiles turns to Kira. “So, tell me about yourself. Scott says you teach martial arts? Does that wicked sword I saw last night feature?”

Kira blushes again. He gets the feeling she does that a lot. But she gamely launches into an explanation of what styles she teaches and how she got into it while they eat. She’s friendly, open and curious. Clever, too, with a goofy sense of humor that matches Scott perfectly. If they ever have kids, they’ll be dimpled, blushing piles of adorableness and fluff.

It’s almost enough to let Stiles forget about the Sword of Damocles hanging over all their heads for a little while, until, all of a sudden, a skinny brunette with an upturned nose drops into the empty seat next to him and he’s staring at his female self. 

He heard somewhere that there’s a likely chance of anyone who ever truly saw their own body from the outside going mad, and for a handful of seconds, he thinks there might be some truth to it because that is him, his body, his skin and his features, his nose and eyes and mouth and moles and hair, that is him, is Stiles, is herself, right there, not herself.

Other. 

Reflexively, he starts to shift, to test if someone, somehow _stole_ , but it’s still there, he can feel herself before the change ever becomes obvious, in the shortening of muscles and the tightening of bone, in the shift in his hips and the ache in his belly.

Scott and Kira are reacting, too, he’s peripherally aware of them, but not nearly as extremely as him. It’s not like they know that this is unusual, that for all he’s posed as a twin before, it’s never actually been _true_. But both their hands have disappeared below the table, reaching for weapons, hopefully and then – 

Then the imposter grins.

Stiles remembers those teeth.

Only two days ago, they were sunk bone deep in his flesh.

“Nogitsune,” he hisses in recognition. Across the table, Kira gasps, rearing back. “What the fuck are you doing inside my skin?”

His voice is too low, a rumble of shifting rock, but he can’t help it, can’t keep the fury out, because Void is _wearing his skin_ , grinning at him.

“Fire-kin,” it – she – it greets, calmly, closing Stiles’ lips over those too pointy, vulpine teeth. Turns to Kira, “Thunder-child.” 

It cocks its head. Stiles’ head. Damnit. “Tell your mother I will come for her, little cousin. Tell her I remember the oath she broke and I will take what was promised me.”

That sounds ominous. Kira frowns. “You know my mother?”

The nogitsune chuckles. “Celestial. Kind of a bitch. She called on me when her love died and when I came, she was too cowardly to see it through. Locked me inside that fucking tree for seventy years.” It snarls, angry, and somehow, between two days ago and now, it vocabulary got a facelift. It sounds like, maybe, just maybe, that might actually be Stiles forming the words coming out of her mouth. 

God, there are far too many pronouns going round. 

Kira looks like she might want to say something to that, but Scott, pale and with the memory of Deaton’s ravaged corpse fresh in his mind (Stiles is guessing), grips her forearm and shakes his head. She looks at him, her eyes go wide, she closes her mouth.

Good. 

They’re both too adorable to be making small talk with ancient, bodiless creatures of shadow and darkness. Speaking of.

“I thought you didn’t have a body? Void and all that?”

It – okay, damnit, she – she shrugs. “I told you, never-brother. Somewhere, I die wearing your face. That makes it mine, don’t you think.”

Stiles hitches up an eyebrow. “Not really?”

The teeth again. 

“Why are you here? I thought you’d have hightailed it out of this shithole by now?”

Scott makes an offended noise, bless his heart. The waitress approaches their table with the bill, stops, by some primordial prey instinct, ten feet away and turns on her heel to disappear into the kitchen. 

The booths on either side of them are empty, but the next one toward the door is occupied by a suddenly shifting, tense couple. The hunter across the room is taut as a spring. 

There is a predator in this room, far beyond a kitsune and a half blooded dragon, something ancient and dark and vicious and they can all tell. It’s sort of amusing, from a very weird angle. 

“But I owe you a boon,” nogitsune simpers, lashes fluttering. Okay. Stiles is never using that move to flirt ever again. Kira gives a choked little whimper.

“Bullshit,” he snaps. “You are not considerate enough to stick around for that. If I want my boon, I’m going to have to track your ass down. Why are you still here?”

Laughing, she taps her nose, wiggling it cutely. “I can smell the chaos coming to this town, the strife. The pain. You’re practically steeped in it, already. It’s coming for you, and you only, never-brother, and it tastes… so… yummy.” She licks her lips, slowly, seductively. Turned on, but Stiles is not thinking that, because then he’ll have to think about his own orgasm face on someone else and, just – no. 

This situation is weird enough without bringing sex into it. 

Kira makes that noise again.

“Okay. That explains why you’re in town. Why are you in this diner, sitting next to me, freaking everyone the fuck out?”

“Have you found the good doctor’s journals, yet?”

Which is the opposite of an answer, literally, but also interesting, so Stiles rolls his eyes. “We’re working on it.”

A disappointed tongue-clack. “Sloppy.”

“We were busy,” he defends, only to get another clicking of the tongue. He rolls his eyes. “Just fucking tell me what you want me to know?”

“Is that your boon?” She sounds eager. 

Immediately, Stiles shakes his head because there are too many unknowns, a calm before the storm, a whole bunch of bodies already on the ground and enemies behind enemies behind enemies. A favor from an ancient, near-immortal, absolutely immoral creature? Is invaluable. He’s not going to squander it for information. 

“No.”

She huffs. “Then why should I tell you?” To go with the cutesy act, she raises one hand and wiggles her fingers at the hunter.

Stiles snatches it out of the air and shoves it under the table. 

“Because that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” he drawls, lazy, like he isn’t having an epiphany as he speaks. “You want to tell me something. Because you’re bored or because I create chaos for you to feed on, or maybe because of some misplaced cross-universe sentimentality where I killed you while you wore my face and you _liked it_ , but you want to help me. So tell me whatever you’re going to tell me, and then get the fuck out of my fucking face. In both senses of the phrase.”

His voice has gone too deep again, but except Kira and Scott, there’s no-one close enough to notice. The nogitsune smiles at him and there are so many teeth in her mouth and behind them, a yawning abyss. 

“Clever Stiles,” she drawls, wresting free her hand and patting him on the cheek with it. “Always the clever one. It’s why I chose you. Not the good one, not the righteous one, but you. I crawled into your belly and I ate inside your brain and you fought me. And in the end, you won. You won and I died and all that was left of me became you and all that was left of you in me became…,” she cocks her head, closes her eyes. Smiles. “What do you know of dragon lore, little brother?”

Since Stiles figures this is about as direct an answer as he’s ever going to get from an ancient trickster spirit, he plays along. “It exists in almost every major culture in some way. Immortal, powerful, guarding treasure. Extinct today, or so I’m told.”

Nogitsune taps pointy, dark nails on the tabletop. They’re not Stiles’ nails, nor are they his claws. The first overt difference he can find between their bodies. “Extinct a dozen times over. And yet, somehow, some way, they always come back. They were hunted to extinction in what you Westerners call the Dark Ages, lost in the days of the Great Emperors, trapped and skinned and slaughtered in the Land Between Two Rivers, frozen forever under the Last Great Ice. Over and over and over.” She taps those nails along with her last words, pointedly, pointing. 

Stiles squints. He feels slow and stupid, exhausted and angry and hunted, but he’s still got enough brainpower to catch on to what she wants him to catch. “Somehow, they keep coming back.”

Abruptly the tapping stops, turning instead into a snap of the fingers, a pleased grin. “Exactly.”

As suddenly as she sat down, the nogitsune stands again, leaning in to press a brief, stinging kiss to Stiles’ cheek. “Now,” she tells him, a cheeky farewell, “you should really check out that alley across the street. You’ll know the one.”

And then she’s out of there, swaying her hips in a way Stiles has never quite gotten the hang off, all loose grace and casual violence.

She’s gone. 

There’s a beat of silence, of stillness, and then life rushes back into the void her presence created. People pick up conversations that trailed off. The waitress reappears.

“You know,” Scott mutters, clutching his girlfriend’s hand like a lifeline, his free hand on his gun, “things have been nice and boring around here for so long, I actually forgot the way you just seem to attract trouble.”

“What,” Stiles quips, “the murder field trip last night wasn’t enough to remind you?” 

He flags down the waitress for a coffee refill just so he can wrap his hands around something. Maybe this way, no-one will notice the way they shake. 

+

There is a body in the alley across the street. Can’t miss it. Even Stiles’ comparably dull senses pick it up as soon as they cross the street. It’s pungent enough – blood and entrails and early decay, to make him wonder how he missed it before. 

It’s half hidden behind a dumpster, classic horror movie style, feet first. Sneakers. Jeans. He ignores Kira’s quiet noise of surprise, Scott’s indrawn breath and creeps forward enough to see – 

“Jesus fucking Christ!!”

His fists clench, involuntarily, and he feels the pinpricks of claws piercing skin. The fucking – 

“Stiles?”

“It’s a kid,” he manages, and his voice is doing that rumbling thing again, too deep, and his hands are bleeding and the world is taking on a yellowish tint, vision gone sideways and, “it’s a goddamn fucking kid, no older than fifteen.”

Her ribcage is cracked open like a juicy fruit, red all over, entrails spilling onto the dirty asphalt. The heart is missing. 

Dimly, Stiles hears his phone ring. 

He answers it on autopilot. “Stiles? Stiles, where are you? Why aren’t you wearing your bud?”

Took it out for the interview. Stupid. He hangs up the phone, plugs in the earwig, says, “There’s a dead girl off Johnson. Her heart’s missing.”

“We’re already on our way,” Boyd says. Apparently, Lydia has been busy, giving out tech. 

The girl was a redhead, too. Just like Lyds. But Lyds got to turn sixteen, seventeen, twenty, twenty-five. Lyds gets to live and be amazing. This girl doesn’t. Won’t ever be more than this, pile of blood and meat. Because of him. For him. To make him angry. 

“You are?” His voice is wrong, off. He hears it, but can’t do anything about it. 

“Peter heard your heartbeat go haywire,” Boyd informs him. Stiles hums in acknowledgement, crouches down by the girl. So much meat. Her liver – no, there it is. Only the heart. 

Up close she looks even younger. Someone’s probably already missing her. 

“I need to call this in,” Scott murmurs, apologetically. Stiles snarls at him. Long and loud and vicious enough to surprise even himself. 

Scott rears back, like prey, like weakness, and Stiles can feels his claws pushing at the bones of his fingers, can feel his eyes shifting color, can already feel Scott’s flesh, torn asunder under his rage, just like that girl, that little red girl, fire and life and then gone. 

“Stiles, you need to calm down,” that’s Kira, Kira, who smells of thunderstorms and strawberry body wash, she’s almost cute, pushing in front of Scott to protect her squishy human mate, as if she could, tiny thing, as if she’d be any sort of barrier if Stiles really wanted to – 

“Please, Stiles, you’re angry, I get that, but you need to calm down.” She’s staring at something past his shoulder, except, no, no, not past him. His cheek. She’s staring at his cheek and now Scott is, too, and they smell – not afraid, not exactly, but apprehensive. 

It makes Stiles even madder. He flicks his fingers, lets his claws dance free, sees them in his peripheral vision, longer, darker than usual, almost _talons_ , instead of just claws and then – 

Peter barrels into him like a freight train, shoving Stiles’ face into his shoulder, ear pressed to soft cotton, and underneath a heartbeart, heartbeat, heartbeat. Peter. Lover. Mate. Alpha. 

Stiles feels his fingers reshape as he regains control. Peter’s hold turns into an embrace, soft words muttered into his ear. Stiles breathes.

“Sorry,” he eventually mumbles, muffled by Peter’s shirt and his own shame. He hasn’t lost control like this in years. Not since the whole dragon thing was new and he spouted claws at every turn. He shredded quite a few things, in those first few weeks. “Sorry. But this guy is really starting to piss me off. She was a kid. Just a kid and she’s dead because of me.”

The statement alone is enough to make him itch again, so he breathes, carefully, until the urge passes.

“Understandable,” Peter answers, rumble of alpha in his voice, still so new and already so well used. “But, sweetheart, you were shifting.”

Stiles takes a step back from the wolf, carefully keeping his gaze off the little girl. Lydia is crouching in the way, anyway. “I know. Sorry. You know the claws just happen sometimes.”

“Not just the claws,” Kira pipes up, “there were scales on your face, Stiles.”

He blinks. “Right. No way. Eyes and fangs and claws. I don’t have scales. I’m not a freaking kanima.”

“There were definitely scales,” Scott pipes up, still wide-eyed.

Stiles turns to Peter, wide-eyed. He nods. “I only caught a glimpse, but there were scales. Pretty golden brown, just like your eyes.”

Stiles considers that for a moment. Then he flings out both hands in the universal sign for _hold on there, buddy_. “Nope. No. Not dealing with this. Dead girl, Puppeteer, hunters, rogues, FBI. Oh, and the fact that the nogitsune is walking around wearing me like a cheap dress. That. Me growing scales? No. Not happening. I refuse.”

Lydia and Peter exchange a _look_. Stiles huffs. Then they both shrug. They know full well when Stiles can be budged and when it’s better to just indulge him. Right now? They’ll indulge him.

Lydia straightens. “Her heart was torn out. As far as I can tell, that’s also the cause of death. Everything else is just…,” she trails off, unsure of the wording.

Stiles bites back on a snarl. “It’s for fun. Her ribcage is cracked over the heart, it’s torn out. She dies. There was absolutely no need to rip open her belly, to shred her like this.”

“It might be to disguise the cause of death.”

“I think,” Boyd, who is hanging back with Erica, barely far enough into the alley to not be readily visible from the street, “whoever is doing this isn’t really concerned with keeping a low profile.”

Which, considering that it’s bright daylight in a downtown shopping area and they already have the FBI, fanatic hunters and newly bitten wolves around, yeah. 

“So,” Stiles concludes. “Fun. Anyone else really want to rip this fucker into tiny pieces? I mean, confetti sized. At most. Just… tiny, tiny pieces of asshole.”

Scott makes a noise. Then, bravely, he says, “You guys should get out of here. I’m calling this in now.”

And then he takes out his phone and does just that.

+

“So we have something ripping hearts out now?” The Sheriff rubs at his face and looks like he regrets everything that has happened in the past few days. Stiles feels him. A lot. 

Everyone has piled back into the Stilinski living room, and there isn’t nearly enough coffee to go around for all the exhausted, anxious, angry faces. 

“Looks like,” Scott confirms with a badly hidden swallow. He still hasn’t regained his color after looking at that dead girl. Her name, her dropped backpack revealed, was Shelly Crocker. She would have turned fifteen in three weeks. 

“Only the heart,” Lydia clarifies, ever the pragmatic one. 

“So it’s not a wendigo,” Allison excludes with a shudder of relief and disgust, equal doses. “They eat… everything.”

“We know the werewolves eat hearts myth is bullshit. Witches?”

“There’s way too many rituals that take the hearts of virgins, but there were distinct claw marks.”

“Maybe we have multiple bad guys,” Isaac pipes up. “Or maybe the heart thing is just meant to confuse us more?”

Stiles huffs, frustrated beyond reason. “It’d fucking fit with the rest of this shitshow.”

Peter’s hand finds one of his, squeezes. “You need to calm down.”

“Easier said than done. We need to find whoever is doing this, and get rid of them. We need to stop this. There are too many innocents drawn into it.” He looks at Erica and Boyd as he says it, both of them pale and shaken and quiet. Brave, too, impossibly brave in the face of the nightmare they have been flung into, but they shouldn’t have to be. They should be perfectly, blissfully unaware and happy, not… this. 

He averts his gaze from them, finds his father instead. The man has aged ten years since Stiles arrived in town, and none of them sit easy on his shoulders. Too many shocks, too many deaths. Too many strange things he doesn’t quite want to be true. 

Too much Stiles, really. 

“We can step up the plans for LA,” Alli offers into the ensuing silence. “Pull it off tonight. It’ll give us Deaton’s files, right? There has to be _something_ in there.”

Her boyfriend nods confirmation. Chris frowns. “That’s awfully fast. Are you sure you can do it?”

Alli nods, looks first to Lydia then to Stiles. “If we take Lydia so she can lend us some mojo to smooth over the rough spots from lack of prep time, then yes. We can.”

The decision, in the end, is Stiles’. He decides on the division of labor, on who goes where, on the risks they take. If he tells them to go, they’ll go and break into an FBI office with less than twelve hours of prep time.

But if Allison says they can do it, then they can.

He nods. “Do it. But if it gets too hot, you abort and get the fuck out.”

It’d be sure to put the FBI back on their asses and ruin their chances of ever getting at Deaton’s shit, but he values their lives more. They come first. The rest of mankind comes in a distant second.

All three of them nod and stand to start packing. The Sheriff groans, buries his face in his hands and says, “I’ll just forget that conversation ever happened, shall I?”

And Stiles boils over.

Peter sees it coming, or smells it, or hears it in his rising heartbeat, but all he does is take half a step closer to Stiles because he knows, he knows, when Stiles gets like this, there is really no stopping him. 

Stiles is going to kiss him for that. Later. Now he rounds on his father even as he can feel his eyes flash, can feel the ever-present heat under his skin flare. “Why? So you don’t have to arrest me? Oh, wait, already did that.”

The rest of the team start herding out the innocent bystanders at his tone of voice and this is going to get ugly, he knows it is, but he can’t stop it, won’t stop it, boiling point reached and obliterated. Fucking fire, baby.

The Sheriff sighs. “There was evidence, Stiles, it’s not like I-“

“Arrested me at the drop of a hat, based on evidence so fucking shoddy I could pick it apart in under ten minutes without _ever having seen it_?!” He flexes claws, digs them into his own thighs to keep himself from doing worse, doing something he will never be able to forgive himself for. But he is so angry. “I mean, I don’t expect much from you, but the benefit of the fucking doubt when it comes to multiple homicide would be nice, you know. I’m your son!”

His voice has gotten deeper, a low rumble now, and he registers it vaguely, another fucking worry, another concern, as if someone after his hide, newly bitten wolves, dead children and goddamn fucking Beacon Hills weren’t enough already. Now he’s – 

“But I wasn’t wrong, was I?” his dad shoots back and his voice is hard, too. Cop voice, again. Stiles can’t remember them ever having a meaningful conversation where it didn’t make an appearance. Fuck, he thinks of his own father as ‘sheriff’ more than ‘dad’. What the fuck does that say about them?

“We’re trying to save lives, here!”

“This time. From something you brought down on this town. I can read between the lines, Stiles. Don’t try to tell me you’re the good guys.”

And Stiles – Stiles bites his lip, bites it hard, tastes blood and torn skin, bites harder and swallows it because his father is right. They’re not. From a human standpoint, they’re all monsters. Hell, even from their own standpoint they’re not exactly Mother Theresa. They try, though. No children, no innocents. No death to people who don’t deserve it. No stealing from people who need it. They have rules. Guidelines. They’re not the bad guys, either. 

But there is no explaining that to a cop of thirty-two years. So Stiles bites his lip and swallows it all because there are other things he needs to fix, things more important than a man he doesn’t see more than once every few years and if he doesn’t stop now, if he doesn’t take a step back, he’ll _burn_.

Peter either sees the signs, or senses Stiles’ decision, _something_ , because he says his name softly, hand on his arm, says, “Sweetheart,” and when Stiles turns to look again, there is something small and shiny in his hand. Lydia’s make-up mirror. 

He holds it up. Along the left side of Stiles’ face, from his chin to his hairline, curling under his eye and over the bridge of his nose, are scales, shimmering gold in the light. Behind him, his father exhales, heavily. 

“I don’t have scales,” Stiles points out. His voice sounds calm over the rush of blood in his ears. 

“You do now. And I think you need to calm down.”

He snorts. “Can’t. Want to. I feel…”

“Hunted,” Peter concludes for him, his lips a thin line, his eyes glowing like embers as he battles his own animal instincts. Threatened mate will do that, Stiles thinks. It’s that thought, paradoxically, that calms him down enough for the scales and claws and eyes and fangs and fire to recede. 

He turns back to the Sheriff, who is watching them with tired, weary (wary) eyes and says, “I know you don’t approve of what I’ve become. I’ve always known. It’s why I hid it from you. But right now, we need to deal with this shit show. We can fight afterwards. Deal?”

And he knows, with absolute certainty, that his father is thinking of Shelley Crocker in an alley with her heart cut out, Hello Kitty backpack next to her, her parents the last number in her call history, as he nods. “Deal.”

+  
 


	3. Friday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plot unravelling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, guys! The last part will either be up later tonight or late on Saturday, because I'm going on a short trip. We'll see how it works out.

+

Friday

+

They get ten hours of peace, listening to the others in LA lay the groundwork for their heist, before Melissa calls, sounding distinctly frazzled.

“Scott?” she asks. Stiles is close enough to his buddy to hear everything, vegged out in front of the TV, unable to sleep or focus anymore. 

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

“I am absolutely going to need that explanation about what the hell is going on in this town sooner rather than later, but right now, there is someone mutilating corpses in the morgue and I just found a ripped-off arm in the breakroom and it has _teethmarks on it_ , so if you could please come over and _bring your gun_ , that would be fantastic.” She pauses, takes an audibly shaky breath. “Love you. Now get your ass here.”

With that she hangs up, leaving Scott staring at the phone blankly until Stiles hauls him up. “You heard the lady, let’s move.”

Scott nods and dials the station, informing dispatch of what’s going on while they head toward his cruiser, still parked in the driveway. Chris and Peter pile into the car with them, as does Kira. 

Stiles, meanwhile, puts in a private call to his father, asking him to keep the other deputies out of it. Maybe send Parrish. No more people need to be involved in this.

The Sheriff agrees, starts delegating before the call is even ended and Scott floors it toward the hospital. 

“Wendigo?” Chris asks, conversationally, as he checks his weapons and spare mags, perfectly casual.

Peter, crammed into the backseat next to Stiles and Kira, grunts, “Might be a ghoul.”

“A ghoul would be easy to put down,” Kira muses. “They’re mindless, right? Just reantimated flesh?”

“Begs the question who reanimated it, then,” Chris points out, while Stiles counters, “Going by our truly shitty luck so far, it’s not a ghoul. Wendigos are fast, smart and a lot more dangerous. It’s going to be a wendigo.”

Kira turns wide Disney eyes on him, blinks twice and then says, “True. But they’re easier to put down for good.”

He side-eyes her. “You’re an optimist, aren’t you?”

She taps her cool belt. “Optimist with a sword,” she corrects. 

As Scott careens around a corner, Stiles leans forward as far as the wire mesh divider will allow. “Marry her,” he tells his friend. He’s not even kidding. 

+

Melissa is waiting for them in the breakroom she mentioned, the gnawed-on arm hidden under a sheet, holding herself like a coiled spring. 

“What the hell is going on here?” she demands as soon as they all file in, one cop, four civilians, all of them looking grim and very obviously armed. 

Scott and Chris crouch to peek under the sheet, Peter starts sniffing and Kira puts an arm around Melissa to hug her maybe-future-mother-in-law. 

Stiles, way past the point of giving any fucks, just happily chirps, “The supernatural is real. Congrats, it’s a wendigo.”

“Yes,” Chris backs him up from the floor, “it actually is. Damn, I was hoping for ghoul.”

“They smell,” Peter points out, in distaste.

“Wendigos do, too,” Stiles counters. “It’s the bits of people stuck between their teeth.”

A hysterical giggle reminds them all that they have an audience. Melissa looks a little pale and a little mad around the eyes, but other than that and the giggle, she’s actually holding up fairly well. 

Stiles leaves her in the capable hands of her son and his girlfriend and turns to his partner instead, “Fido, fetch!”

Peter rumbles something that sounds a lot like, “You’re lucky I love you,” but obediently turns toward the door, already inhaling. After a second, his nose scrunches up in disgust and his eyes flare red. “This way.”

Hunting wendigos is pretty much a shitshow beginning to end because they’re fast – faster than almost any other creature, and they have really, really pointy teeth. The only saving grace is that, while they get super strength, their senses don’t match, so if you’re, say, an alpha werewolf, a dragon and an experienced hunter, you might be able to sneak up on them. If you’re lucky. 

… Which they never are. 

They find the wendigo and its eau de death in a closet in the basement, close to the morgue. From the sound of things, it’s gnawing on something. Stiles hopes dearly that it raided the fridge and didn’t go for farm fresh. The trail of blood leading down the hallway kind of makes him think that it’s option B, though. Shit. Because what they totally need is more dead people. 

Chris gestures for them to move to flank the door while he hangs back. Since he’s the guy with the ranged weapon, Stiles nods and he and Peter slink down the hall as quietly as they can. If he doesn’t think too much, he can totally pretend he’s at the food court and the sounds he’s hearing are being made by an old granny sucking a wing clean. 

Totally. 

Not.

They’re five steps away when the noises abruptly stop and a low growling starts up instead. It heard them. Whoops. 

So much for apex predator-dom. 

They lunge for the door at the same time, Stiles pressing down the handle and falling into a crouch as Peter leaps over him and bowls the wendigo over before it can make a run for it. 

Stiles comes back to his feet and does his best to block the doorway while Peter sprouts fangs, claws and sideburns and starts to _shred_ the thing. Literally. He’s got the wendigo in its – his, it’s male – back between his knees, sets his claws into his shoulders and yanks downwards, rending muscle and sinew as he goes. It’s pretty gruesome and plenty bloody, but the thing is fucking _eating people_ and Stiles isn’t the only one about to blow a gasket and also, disabling a wendigo is always the way to go. 

Once Peter has rendered the arms dysfunctional, he grabs for the head, barely evades fangs in his wrist, and twists. Pop goes the wendigo. 

They both pause for a heartbeat, then two, until the body slumps, boneless and very, very dead. Stiles cranes his head back to give Chris a thumbs up. “Dead and minced,” he announces.

Then he goes looking for a mop. Fucking wendigos. 

+

Cleaning up after the monster takes longer than actually killing the monster does, especially since the gore under Peter’s claws transfers to his human nails and he washes them for about fifteen minutes and disinfects them until they’re red. He’s a werewolf. That should not be possible.

“I have watched you rip out vampire throats with your fangs. Why are you fretting over a bit of wendigo under your nails?”

Fun fact: Melissa and Scott make identical ‘oh gross’ noises. Peter just uses one of his sparkling clean fingers to flip Stiles off, then announces, “I need to get out of here, the smell is making me seriously consider throwing up.” 

And Stiles decides, screw it, and just heads after him. The others have it covered. They haven’t been running on fumes for days. 

He catches up to his wolf in the elevator, steps inside and takes Peter’s hand to squeeze. As soon as the door closes, Peter uses that hand to spin Stiles into the nearest wall, back first, railing digging painfully into his hipbones as Peter presses close and licks into his mouth, hungry and angry and desperate and they make out like horny teenagers for the full thirty seconds the elevator takes to bring them to the ground level. Then, as soon as it grinds to a halt, Peter lets go of Stiles, who somehow managed to wrap one leg around Peter and needs to steady himself, and steps back, still holding that hand.

“We need to end this,” he rumbles, still too much wolf in his voice.

And because Stiles _knows that_ he just sighs. Nods. It should have been over after Deucalion. And it should have been over after Deaton. And now it’s Erica and Boyd and Shelley and Calaveras and Chris and Theo and the FBI and his dad and Scott and Kira and the morgue attendant, poor fucker, they still don’t know anything that matters. 

He’s being hunted and he doesn’t even know by who. Whom? He always gets that wrong. 

They step out into the early evening with sighs of relief as the hospital smell stops tickling their noses and automatically, Stiles turns them toward the alley where he and Scott once spent many an afternoon practicing their ollies while Melissa was working. It leads to the delivery bay around back of the hospital, so it’s fairly broad and not cluttered up with dumpsters. Just a broad, protected piece of road that only ever gets used a few times a day for laundry and food deliveries. 

Smack in the middle of it, on top of a drainage grate that tripped Scott off his board more than once, lies an old man in a hospital gown. His heart is missing. 

+

“So, we’re pretty sure they’re left, like, for you, directly, right? I mean, you found two for two, that can’t be coincidence,” Scott summarizes. The bags under his eyes are looking like they’re starting to develop consciousness. 

Stiles kicks angrily at the leg of the kitchen table. “All of this is for me, Scott, pay some fucking attention.” By his count, that’s five innocents dragged into it and he doesn’t. Know. Why. 

If he did, he’d have offered himself on a silver platter by now just so it would stop, just so they could have an honest, open fight. Anything but this holding pattern. He clenches his hands into fists, claws digging at soft skin and just looking at Scott looking at him he can tell he’s doing the scales thing again. And the eyes. Everything is a little hazy, a little tinged in gold. 

Useless. 

Fucking useless. 

In his ear, Theo suddenly announces, “Well, that was bracing!” 

The comms are switched to one-way, so the team in Beacon Hills doesn’t distract the heist crew, but apparently, they’re done now. At least judging by the manic delight in Theo’s voice. Stiles switches over. “You got it?”

“Easy peasy. Even planted a fake, so they might never notice. Impressed, Stiles?”

“At you doing your job? Which we are paying you for? Massively. ETA?”

Isaac pushes into the conversation before Theo can get his creepy-creeper flirt on and drive Peter into a rage. Again. “About two hours. We’ve already collected Lyds. Want us to head directly to the vet’s place?”

Stiles nods while holding up a finger to quell Scott’s questions. “Yeah. We’ll head over there in a while, find the trunk. The faster we get to the bottom of this, the faster I can kill someone and sleep for a week.”

The boys laugh. “Aye, aye,” Isaac chirps at the same time Theo offers, “You’re hot when you’re angry.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Put a sock in it, before Peter puts a claw in it, coyote.”

He drags himself, wearily, to his feet, turns to his first friend. “You up for ransacking your old boss’ office for a magical trunk?”

Downing the last of his coffee, Scott stands. “Sure. It’s all I ever wanted.”

Kira and Peter meet them by the door.

+

Deaton’s office is eerily quiet for the first time in Stiles’ memory. Apparently, someone dropped by to get the animals and take them wherever, because all the cages are empty and the usual backdrop of uncomfortable animals in small cages is missing. Eerie. 

It’s barely morning and Deaton has been dead two entire days. Feels like five minutes ago and also, several years. In his head, Stiles is chanting an endless litany of ‘fuck, fuck, fuck’, just so he doesn’t say it out loud. 

He’s perched on the stainless steel table at the center of the room, swinging his legs and flexing his claws, in and out, in and out, to try and regain some semblance of control. Peter is standing guard by the backdoor, Scott is pacing, Kira is fretting, clearly uncomfortable, and the trunk hopefully containing the answers to all their questions is sitting innocently on the tiled floor, looking decidedly out of place. 

It’s made of wood so dark and hard, Stiles suspects the nemeton to be the source, with cold iron bands on all sides, runic inscriptions, several layers of wards and a good, old-fashioned padlock. It looks like it belongs at a Renn fair as a prop, not into a sterile clinic, but there it is. Wasn’t easy to find, either. Apparently, Deaton got paranoid in his old age. The thing was glamored to look like a freaking filing cabinet, on top of all the other overkill protections. 

Just about on time, a car pulls up outside and the pack piles out, followed by Theo. Peter growls preemptively, but opens the door, brushing against the girls and Isaac briefly as they file in. Theo, he flashes his fangs at. 

The chimera croons, “Oh, Peter, I missed you, too,” and blows the alpha a kiss. To which Peter reacts by flashing his new eyes, making Theo freeze. Not for long, because nothing throws Theo for long, but long enough. 

Peter smirks, a hint of fang in it. Theo inclines his head and steps away. No pissing matches today. He doesn’t even try to hug or kiss Stiles hello, just throws him a wave and a grin and offers, “Sounds like you got yourself in deep shit, Stilinski.”

“And you just had to come watch,” Stiles fires back as Lydia starts systematically laying out everything Deaton had on him when he died. 

For once, Theo actually drops the smarmy douche act, raising his hands defensively. “I’m here to help. I owe you.”

Because Stiles is pretty much the only reason Theo is alive. He could have left him to the Dread Doctors; god knows he was tempted. The guy’s a dick. But that doesn’t warrant death. So in a brief moment of heroic idiocy, he helped Theo get out alive and the guy has been following him around like a stray puppy since. Sort of. The thing is, under all the douche, Theo is just really, really lost and broken and Stiles, well. He’s self-aware, okay. And he knows that the only difference between him and Theo are the people around him. So that’s how he treats Theo and Theo, in turn, treats Stiles better than most people in this world. 

“Stiles,” Lydia commands, pointing at the items laid out next to him on the table. He hops off to stand beside her, slinging an arm around her waist. 

Immediately, he picks out the key. “Padlock.”

Lydia picks it up, studies it. “It won’t be the ward key, though. That’d be stupid.”

Stiles studies what’s on offer. Phone, keyring, wallet. Its contents (cards, cash, a Subway reward card, a picture of a beautiful woman with a sly grin – girlfriend? Sister?). Pen, a few folded notes. Watch, ring, a few empty vials. At a guess, at least one of them contains traces of the wolfsbane-gold-roofie mixture the good doctor dosed them with when he kidnapped them. 

He can rule out phone, watch, pen, notes and the wallet itself. Ditto the vials. That leaves the keys, the wallet contents and the ring.

“Think we get three tries?” he wonders out loud. 

“Not actually a fairy tale,” Isaac points out. “Dragon aside.”

Theo opens his mouth, closes it and then points at Stiles, a triumphant look on his face. “You fucker! I knew there was something about you! You smell like the iguana this kid in my class had!”

“I do not!” Stiles defends, reflexively. Peter would have told him if he smelled like lizard and Isaac would be poking endless fun at him. He smells of fire, mostly. “Now shut up. If you were a dead druid vet, what would you key your wards to?”

“What, shut up, or talk?”

“Theo, shut up. Everyone else, talk.”

Scott steps forward to Lydia’s other side. “Not the ring. He didn’t wear it a lot, with the gloves and all. You said he’d always have it with him, right?”

Lydia considers, them puts the ring with the other no-nos. 

Stiles studies the rest, chews on his lip and tries to think. His brain is a fuzzy mess and he feels stupid and slow. “Would Deaton consider making a key the key too obvious, or a clever double bluff?”

He digs through the loose change with a finger, playing, keeping his hands busy to try and spark an idea. Suddenly, Lydia’s hand clamps over his like a vice, pulling it back and picking a penny up between two perfectly done nails. 

“This one,” she says.

“What? Why?” Isaac looks at the pile. “There’s half a dozen pennies in here. Accidentally spending your super-secret key would be stupid, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” Lyds agrees primly, turning the penny over in her hands. “But no-one actually pays with pennies, do they?”

“So why this one?” Allison asks, more prompt than actual question. 

“Because it’s a 1909 penny. The first one minted with Lincoln on it. It’s special, but it doesn’t stick out. Low-key.”

“Which we know Deaton liked. He was a freaking vet in his day job. Doesn’t get more ‘nothing here to see’ than that, does it? It’s never the vet.” Stiles is starting to agree with their resident genius.

“That’s because it’s always the gardener,” Theo pipes up.

“Butler,” Isaac corrects.

“Shut up,” Peter tells them. 

They shut up. Stiles looks at Lydia. Lydia looks at Stiles. They both look at Scott. No-one finds a flaw in Lydia’s logic, so she nods, grabs the padlock key and crouches in front of the chest. First she unlocks it, then she presses the penny carefully against the latch of the chest, one hand hovering over the lid, eyes closed. Feeling, Stiles knows, for the magic. This kind of finicky, complex and fragile magic has never been his forte. He can only tell that there is strong magic on the chest and that it’s somehow shifting, now. After a moment, it settles down again and Lyds takes a deep breath and, with a single movement, throws open the chest. 

Automatically, they all pause to wait for something terrible to happen, Temple of Doom style. Don’t mock, it happens more often than you think. When no ceilings start to cave in and no acid destroys their loot after a few moments, they all exhale slowly and watch their banshee survey the contents of Deaton’s deepest secrets. 

She bends, plucks out a single item and holds it up. It’s a slightly tattered, well used notebook, loose sheets sticking out every which way. Looks an awful lot like a journal. “Jackpot,” she declares. 

+

Lydia is the speed reader among them. She’s also the one person who managed to nap in the past… what, twenty-four hours? So they set her up with a fresh pot of coffee and a lot of paper and pens in the Stilinski’s kitchen and leave her to work in peace while they go and grab some sleep. 

Or pretend to. 

Stiles is pretty sure he hears both Theo and Chris get up after less than an hour. They both leave together. He hopes they’re going on a food run. 

Then, despite the sun shining in his face and the low-simmering furnace of rage boiling in his belly, he falls asleep. 

+

“-iles? Stiles. Come on, sweetheart, up you go.”

Stiles groans, whines and then remembers where and when he is. He shoots up quick enough, he almost brains Peter with his own head. “What?”

Peter laughs. “Alli says they found something.”

Stiles parses that, looks outside the window. Late afternoon sun slants across the yard. He got at least three hours then. Plenty enough. Yay. 

“Then let’s go.”

He pulls his jeans back on, sticks a wad of gum in his mouth because no-one likes morning breath, even when it’s in the afternoon, and follows Peter downstairs, still bleary-eyed.

Alli is seated next to Lydia, book in hand. Isaac perches on the counter behind her. Theo and Chris have found standing room, the Sheriff, back from work, is sitting at the table, too.   
Scott and Kira aren’t around. 

Alli waves and Stiles bends down to press a kiss to her temple on his way to the coffee pot. He pours two mugs, passes one back to Peter without looking and asks, “So?”

The huntress waves her book. “Lydia had me research the spell Deaton used on the Nogitsune.”

“Why?”

Lydia taps the notebook in front of her. “Because this thing spans almost a decade and the last two years? Deaton was not sane. I thought maybe the Void had something to do with it. Such a drastic change….” She shakes her head.

“She was right,” Alli pipes up. “Or, it’s at least possible. I managed to track down the spell in Deaton’s books and it was meant for fae, or werefolk. Low-level, as far as magic is concerned. Not something like the Nogitsune. It’s pretty much a chaos god. The connection would have bled both ways. Had to.”

“So it probably drove him insane.” Stiles considers that, then shrugs. “Yeah, no. He enslaved it first, so go Void.”

“He knew the nemeton was dying and he was afraid it wouldn’t be able to contain it anymore. But as a druid, he couldn’t kill it. That would have tipped the balance something awful.”

“Yeah,” Isaac snarks, “in the direction of good and order. Can’t have that.”

Stiles claps him on the back. “Druids, man. Druids. So what then, Lyds?”

“Deaton found the spell as a last resort and we know he used it. He doesn’t write about it, though. There’s a six month gap in his notes between the idea and the next entry.”

“How does this help us?” The Sheriff wants to know.

Lydia holds up a finger. Wait for it. “Scott and Stiles were right, by the way. Deaton always knew that Stiles was a spark and he never cared. Until shortly after he bound the Void. Here.” She clears her throat. “ _A came to town. Asking after the spark. They know he used to live here. Traced his mother’s line. Asked me. I told them nothing._ ”

“Someone came looking for me?”

“Someone came looking for the spark,” Peter corrects. “It doesn’t sound like they knew who you are. Just what you are. Maybe they traced Claudia here, but didn’t know what name she took?”

“What does my wife have to do with it?”

Stiles points toward himself. “This? Is hereditary, Dad. I get it from mom. When I realized that, I did some digging. Did you know that Claudia wasn’t her birth name? She didn’t exist until the late eighties.”

As a full-blooded dragon, Stiles’ mother might have been centuries old and the name change a natural progression, true. But Stiles remembers a few pretty telling things. Like the fact that she never changed. The protective herbs she used to plant around the house, religiously. The fact that she spoke fluid Russian and hid it from everyone and avoided certain people in town like the plague. Deaton, funnily enough, among them. 

It all points toward someone on the run. And maybe, maybe, Stiles has finally found what she was running from. A. Whoever that is. If they weren’t all dead, he’d guess Argent. But Alli and Chris are the last, apart from a few non-hunting cousins over in France. 

The Sheriff opens his mouth, obviously to argue, but then closes it. He, too, must remember a few strange details. For once, he doesn’t make a fight out of it. 

Lydia goes on. “It continues in that vein for a while. A poking around town. Deaton worrying about them finding you. It’s not stated explicitly, but somehow, he comes to the conclusion that it would be best for you to lose your powers and continue as a normal human.”

“That’s why he tipped of Deucalion? Did he think the guy was going to let me go after her sucked me dry? What the hell?”

“Maybe he didn’t know the exact nature of the artifact,” Chris suggests. “Or maybe he really was going insane. Maybe he relied on information from the nogitsune, who we know had its own agenda.” Namely, to find someone strong enough to break the spell for it. Meaning Stiles. Meaning… Stiles wanted all this to make sense, but not this kind of sense. It looks like, at the end of it, Deaton might just have been another victim. Fuck it all. 

“Either way, it failed,” Isaac adds. “BBQ at sea!”

“Someone whack him,” Peter orders. Theo obliges. Isaac pouts. 

“Let me guess,” Stiles drawls. “When that didn’t work out, he decided the only other way to fix this was to make me his magical slave?”

“At this point, I think,” Lydia theorizes, “Void was probably whispering pretty loudly in his ear. The whole plan was sloppy and we got off far too easy, actually. It definitely used us to free itself.”

“But we can’t be sure,” Alli points out. “There might have been some other reasoning behind it. Do we know what A wants with Stiles?”

“To piss me the fuck off?”

“Yeah, but why? Why the alpha, the hunters, the wendigo, the dead bodies. Where does it all come from? I mean, no one person can organize that much shit.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Peter summarizes. “Deaton was trying to help, but he was apparently insane. Some mysterious ‘A’ is after Stiles and we have no idea why. They are causing untold chaos and we don’t know how. We’re obviously missing a major puzzle piece, still.”

Stiles, draining his mug, suddenly almost chokes. He barely manages to launch past Isaac and spit his mouthful into the sink before hacking up a lung. Peter’s hand finds his back, alternately whacking and rubbing. 

“Chaos,” he croaks, as soon as the coffee’s out of his nostrils. “It’s a fucking chaos spell!”

Lyds, bless her clever brain, catches on immediately. “And the fact that a chaos god is running around the city probably strengthened it exponentially! No wonder Void isn’t leaving.”

“What?” Stiles thinks it’s his father asking, but he can’t be sure. His eyes are still watery. While drinking is a shitty time to have an epiphany. On autopilot, he shrinks down into female just so she can tuck herself into Peter’s chest better and regain her breath.

“A chaos spell,” Chris explains. “With Stiles at the center. It upsets the natural balance around him. It’s why he keeps finding the bodies, why these creatures keep popping up around here. Probably even the hunters, although those may have been staged specifically to keep him here. It fits.”

“But why?”

“That,” Stiles croaks, finally breathing evenly again, “is the fucking sixty-four million dollar question.”

“I think,” Peter decides, hauling Stiles into his chest even more, “it’s time for drastic measures.”

“Murder board?” Isaac asks. 

“Murder board.”

+

They joke that Stiles and her murder boards are their secret weapon, right up there with Lydia’s brains, Allison’s ability to escape from anywhere and Isaac’s big fucking mouth. 

Well, okay, no. The only one who thinks Isaac’s big mouth is a secret weapon is Isaac.

But the murder boards definitely rank, if only because Peter has long ago decreed that Stiles is only to pull them out in an emergency. They’re not good for her, the headspace they put her into.

She goes into a freaking fugue state, sometimes, when she does the murder boards, and no-one likes that. Least of all Peter. 

But here they are, and they need some new clue. Lydia has sifted through all their evidence twice, everyone has pitched in with ideas and nothing came of it. So it’s time for Stiles, her spark and her weirdly wired brain to have a go. 

Stiles isn’t, strictly speaking, smarter, or more knowledgeable than Lydia. But Lydia is, at the heart of her, a deeply logical person. She follows lines or thought, plans, concepts. 

Stiles is the Jackson Pollock equivalent of a thinker. Lateral doesn’t begin to cover how she works. The leaps she takes are insane, the connections she makes impossible. So when nothing else makes sense, they throw everything they have at her and she doesn’t eat, sleep or even talk until she finds some new way to connect the data and make sense of it all. Her spark probably helps, powered pretty strongly by willpower and imagination. Sometimes, she just sits in front of her murder boards and wills herself to see a new connection and something actually pops up. It’s a bit creepy and very exhausting. Peter hates it. 

This time, in lieu of actual boards, she gets the walls of her childhood bedroom, cleared of all posters and detritus, and a fistful of markers Isaac ran out to get. He bought scented ones, because he’s a little shit. 

Peter, perched on the bed and definitely not budging, checks his watch, “You get six hours, then you’re eating.”

Stiles hums, already fumbling through their compiled notes, going through everything since the moment they accepted the job from Deucalion, well over a month ago. Every little detail. Everything anyone said or did. It can all be used. Can all be useful. She just needs to find that one… little….

Lydia enters, closing the door behind her and sitting next to Peter, snuggling into his side a little. She has her laptop with her, and her phone, because it’s not like she’s going to sit idly by and let Stiles do all the work. 

Sometimes just watching her best friend rearrange evidence shakes something loose for the banshee, too. 

So Stiles goes at it, arranging print-outs, pictures and handwritten post-it notes, drawing lines, squiggles and arrows all over the wall. She’ll owe her dad a new coat of pain when this is over. Oh well. 

It starts with Deucalion, sent by Deaton, scared up by the mysterious A and ends with a chaos spell cast on Stiles for ? reason.

She circles the question mark twice, draws five arrows pointing toward ‘A’, steps back. 

Adds in ‘Void’ under ‘Deaton’, connects it to the chaos spell with a little multiply sign next to the line. 

Under the fox, she adds bullet points. _Drove Deaton mad. Sticking around. Calls me brother. Came to me._

Under that, in bright green, supposedly smelling of lime, she writes _Why are dragons not extinct?_

She circles it three times. 

Behind her, Lydia shifts, sitting up. “Explain that,” she orders. 

On autopilot, Stiles answers, “It’s important. Void came to us in that diner specifically to put that thought in my head. It means something.”

“What?”

+

Peter doesn’t like the murder board. Stiles gets too caught up, lets herself get lost in details. It sounds ridiculous, not liking the way his mate collects evidence, but her magic plays into it somehow, they all know that. She makes leaps that can’t possibly be just intuition and it drains her, physically and mentally. Sometimes, she crashes for days after. Others, she doesn’t sleep for a week. 

Peter’s private theory is that when she arranges these boards and spends hours staring at them, she somehow forces her magic to make sense of it. To rearrange reality until something falls out they can use. 

He doesn’t like them under normal circumstances, but after the past few days, all he wants is to grab her and drag her all the way back home to New York, where he can park her behind the strongest wards known to man and wait for whatever wants to kill her to fuck up before he rips its head off. 

The wolf, so much stronger now, so much closer to the surface, is snarling at him to _get. Her. Out._

She’d never forgive him. 

That’s the only reason he hasn’t yet. The pack would help him, he knows, and Stiles would never, ever forgive any of them. 

So he sits, grinds his teeth and lets Lydia prompt Stiles along toward exhaustion and, hopefully, epiphany.

“What does it mean, Stiles?” The redhead asks for the fifth time in as many minutes. Stiles has been compulsively circling the question for just as long, her gaze remote. 

Anyone who doesn’t think there’s magic at work here is obviously a moron. 

Stiles makes an annoyed little sound and picks up a purple pen, writing _scales_ next to the question. Then she draws arrows up to Deucalion’s name, to Deaton. Writes ‘Spark’ across all of it. 

“I don’t have a full shift,” she mutters, even as the skin of her arms gets shimmery, gleaming copper-gold, suddenly. She slips back into her male body, but the scales stay. Peter leans sideways enough to see that, yep, Stiles’ eyes are slitted and glowing, again. 

“I don’t have a full shift.” Pause. “Why are dragons not extinct.” Pause. “Why is A trying to make me angry.”

He circles each statement as he repeats it. Lydia gasps, suddenly, jumps to her feet, seeing something Peter doesn’t, yet. 

“Stiles, do you think-?”

Stiles slams the purple pen against the question mark behind the dragon question hard enough to spray purple ink. 

“Deaton was terrified of your potential,” the banshee announces, unperturbed by the mess. “Not your current powers. Your potential. He wrote that, at least three times. We always assumed ‘spark’ means ‘halfblood’, but –“

“It’s a dominant gene,” Stiles finishes her thought and Peter tries desperately to catch up to them. 

After a beat, Stiles repeats, louder, “It’s a dominant fucking gene!”

He whirls around, grabbing the alpha by the shoulders, “Why are dragons not extinct, Peter?”

“Because…,” and it dawns, “because the dragon gene is dominant. Oh, I get it. Interbreeding with other species doesn’t create halfbloods like we thought. You’re a-“

The rest of the sentence gets stuck in his throat because it suddenly makes sense. Stiles’ ever increasing powers, the new hints at there maybe being a full shift, after all. The vagueness of all ‘spark’ related literature. They thought it was because sparks were rare. But it’s because sparks don’t stay sparks, isn’t it?

It’s because Stiles isn’t a halfbreed at all. 

He presses a kiss to Peter’s lips, sloppy and excited, and sprints out of the room, shouting, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” as he goes. 

Lydia and Peter exchange wide-eyed looks before running after him. 

In the living room, everyone’s congregating while Stiles does his hip-shimmy of victory before announcing, again, “I’ve got it!”

“You’ve got what, Stiles?” Theo asks, smirking. Peter hates the kid. He really does. 

“Why A wants me! Why dragons aren’t extinct! Why everything, Theo. Every. Fucking. Thing!”

“Well?” the Sheriff prompts.

Stiles flops backwards into an armchair and announces without further fanfare, “I’m a trueblooded dragon.”

+

It’s ridiculous, really, how simple it is in the end. Stiles suspected all kinds of evil plots, conspiracies and dark magics, but in the end, it boils down to a simply series of facts. 

One, the reason dragons haven’t gone extinct a dozen times over is that their genes are dominant. Any offspring of a dragon is a dragon. Evidence for that are all of Stiles’ powers, pretty much. 

Two, if he’s trueblood, he undoubtedly has a full shit. Evidence: scales, eyes, fucking talons, fangs.

Three, strong emotions cause shifts. Every werewolf baby knows that. 

Four, A, whoever they are, is trying to piss Stiles off something terrible. All of Beacon Hills is pretty much one giant rat trap designed to make him lose his shit.

Ergo, five, A wants Stiles to get angry enough to shift. 

Which leaves another ‘Why?’ of course. Why do they want him to shift? Stiles has a few theories on that, too. Dragon parts are used in some incredibly potent spells, for one. Or they used to be. Before dragons died out, for supposedly the seventeenth time, or something. Dragon blood supposedly has healing qualities. 

His magical abilities should take a leap if he achieves full shift, too. It’s possible someone intends to harness those. 

The why’s not really important. 

They’ll want to harm him in some way, that much is clear. The chaos spell was probably meant to whittle down his pack, too, at least a little. Leave him unprotected. 

Here’s to being underestimated. Again. 

Next question. Far more important: “How are we going to use that knowledge to draw them out?”

“Well,” Chris announces, holding up a slip of paper with what looks like hastily scribbled instructions to a spell, his phone still in his other hand. “I think I have a way to backtrack the chaos spell. That should give us a name and a face, finally.”

Stiles grabs the paper, studies it and then hums thoughtfully for a moment. Lydia leans over his shoulder. “Can we cast it with what we have?”

“We’re going to need to raid Deaton’s stores, too. We’ll need someone to donate some blood.” He looks up at the people arranged around the room.

Chris frowns. “That’s not a part of the spell.”

“No,” Stiles announces, a sly grin on his face. “That’s for the other spell. We need a summoning spell, too.”

+

 


	4. Sunday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are awesome and I'm terrified that I've built this thing up way big and you're all going to be awfully disappointed by the ending. I'm sorry.

+

Sunday

+

He’s not being quiet. 

He’s not being sneaky. In fact, he’s is bulldozing through the Preserve like a berserker, with no regard as to who hears him coming because he doesn’t give a flying fuck. 

He can hear the pack behind him, feebly trying to catch up, to calm him down, to caution him. It’s not working. Of course it’s not fucking working. He doesn’t want it to.

Peter is snarling and growling, Lydia is shouting, Issac is pleading, Allison is cursing and Chris is stomping like an elephant. They’re coming on like a storm, and about as subtle, too. 

Excellent. 

He is close enough now to smell them, dirtyrottenwrong, gold and wolfsbane and hatred and oh, it smells like candy. Like chaos. Clenching his fists tightly, blood dripping from where he’s digging claws into his own palms, he storms the clearing.

The hunting cabin is quaint, a little cutesy and has seen a lot of use in the past few months. More than in the entire decade before, if the mossy roof and the sagging porch are any indication. A filthy hiding place for a filthy bastard of a coward.

He takes a few steps into the center of the clear space in front of the building, plants his feet and shouts, “Get out here, you sick fucks!”

His voice is deep, resonant and with a sibilant hiss to it, something reptile, or, maybe, a little vulpine. He grins and there are too many teeth in his mouth. 

They filter out of the cabin just as the pack catches up, stopping dead at the treeline, protests falling silent in the face of just who they’re facing. 

The first few out are a couple of hunters, rough looking and armed for bear (or firekin, little brother, angry thing), followed by an old man with grey hair and a cold, sharp face. After him comes a blonde woman, sneer firmly in place. Both of them are armed. 

Their weapons, feeble little things, smell of gold and useless blessings. Cute. 

The two pause as half a dozen more hunters spill out of the door behind them. More move in the shadows beyond the clearing. The two, though, are obviously waiting for a reaction. The woman in particular is fixed on the Artemis girl, off to his right, bow and arrow in hand. 

She doesn’t blink.

Instead he snarls, regaining their attention. “So the darach was right,” he sneers. “She wasn’t too keen on keeping your secrets once we got down to brass tacks, you know. You paid dear Julia for a chaos spell, not for calling down fucking hell on Earth. But then, I guess even you didn’t factor in a chaos deity running rampant at the same time, did you? The dead child was too much for her.”

It was almost pathetic, how fast she broke when they threw Shelley Crocker’s bloody backpack at her. For a darach, she was a feeble thing, barely over the line. Straddling it, rather, a little good, a little bad. Interesting if she hadn’t been so boring. She smelled of nothing but fear. 

She spilled the beans almost willingly, in the end. Didn’t save her. Didn’t fix Erica or Boyd or bring back Shelley or the old man or the morgue attendant. But it ended the spell. No more innocent bystanders. 

Pity. That part was fun. 

“It’s just us now, so why don’t you enlighten me? What’s going on here, huh?”

She did tell them one very interesting tidbit. Namely, who hired her. Chris went chalk white and Allison cursed up a storm, while Peter didn’t regain full control for over an hour. They all tasted of helplessness.

Gerard and Kate Argent, both of them dead for years. Gerard died of cancer ten years ago and Kate was killed shortly after burning down the Hale Pack. For a rogue just like the one they summoned to harass Stiles. 

“And two,” he adds, “Why the fuck didn’t you abort when you realized who’s with me?” He cocks his hips, brings up his arms in a suitably heroic defensive stance, jaw set mulishly. Perfect play. All he’s lacking is a stage to strut and fret upon.

Gerard laughs. He smells like satisfaction and greed and arrogance. Good. Those fall the hardest. He bares his teeth at him. “Why would we? Traitors, both of them. They’ll die just like the rest of your ragtag little monster collection.”

Behind him, he hears Chris inhale sharply and hold it. Allison doesn’t so much as flinch. They’re better than their family. Free agents. So much more interesting than their kin up on the porch, killing, killing, killing. So predictable, people with a creed, a code. Even a murderous one. Making themselves disappear was really the only interesting thing they ever did and even that was boring. 

“We’re not the traitors,” Chris announces, stepping forward. “You are. And what for? The healing properties of a dragon? Your cancer?”

He flings it into the conversation casually, like it doesn’t matter, and his own father falls for it. Or he just doesn’t care. Arrogance. It makes people stupid. Stupid people are even more predictable than straight up evil ones. He laughs again. Kate shifts at his side, a smug little smirk on her face. How many innocents has she killed? Burned to death? How many packs? She probably thinks she’s powerful, little mayfly.

“Oh, Christopher, you always were a little slow on the uptake. The cancer would have killed me years ago. I found a cure for that ages ago.”

He flashes his eyes, alpha red, and suddenly his mouth is full of fangs. 

“And then he shared with me,” Kate announces, adding her own blue eyes and claws to the mix. Her face shifts weirdly, going blue and somehow flat. Almost feline. That’s not a wolf. It smells like damp foliage and fur.

“No, you, little spark, are just the consolation prize.”

He rolls his eyes. “Didn’t see that coming at all,” he mutters, then growls, long and low. This is getting tedious. “What for?”

“Your mother, of course. She got away. But you’ll make just as fine a trophy as she would have. So if you shift right now and let me have your head, we might let some of your little friends go?” He smiles a benevolent grandfather smile with a mouth full of fangs. The better to eat you with, my dear. That’s how that tale goes, isn’t it? 

“And what makes you think I’ll just lay down and die for you?”

Gerard laughs again, loud and full-bellied. He’s a walking, talking villain cliché. “You didn’t even notice, did you? So full of self-righteous rage. Little spark, the trap is already sprung.”

He waves one hand in a grandiose gesture and a dozen armed hunters with electric blue eyes bleed out of the woods, aiming at the pack while a woman with dark hair steps out of the cabin and blows, gently, on her hand. 

In a ten foot circle around the center of the clearing, gold dust suddenly slithers closed, connecting. 

“You’re trapped, powerless and without backup. This is over.”

Peter howls, throwing himself forward until his packmates catch him, hauling him back and away from the guns aimed at him. His howl picks up, suitably dramatic. The others look frantically for escape, putting on a good show. 

The Argents on the porch relax, grinning, gleeful. They have engineered everything that happened in the past week, every dead body, every false trail, and they’re proud. 

They think they’ve won.

There is no reason for them to think that this will go any differently than the past few days have. This is, after all, their final act. All meant to make Stiles lose his head and shift. For a trophy. For fun.

“So this is it? Your grand plan? All of this just to take my head?” He spits.

“No, no. First, you need to shift. Then we’ll take your head. Let’s see how many of your pathetic little pack we have to kill in front of you, before you give in. Which one do we start with? Do you want to choose?”

+

“Oh my god,” Stiles groans, “Shut the fuck up! Christ, can you even hear yourself?”

She stomps past the far side of the cabin, arms windmilling in agitation. “You sound like… like whatever the fuck the opposite of the Evil Overlord list is!”

“Evil cliché?” the male version of her suggests, abruptly relaxing in the center of the gold circle, slouching into something that looks indolent, bored and slightly amused. The image of high-strung tension he portrayed until then, all unhinged and barely holding on, is gone without a trace. Behind him, the pack stops their playacting. 

She snaps her fingers, points. “That’s it! You sound like an evil cliché!”

The hunters (of course Gerard turned a whole bunch of them, goddamn the old fucker, couldn’t he have stayed dead) shift, unsettled by the sudden change in pace all around them. 

“What is going on?” Gerard demands, growling low in his throat. Alpha for a decade. Old man or not, he’ll be a bitch to kill. He looks between male and female Stiles, fake and real Stiles. 

She beams up at him sunnily and comes to a halt just outside the gold circle. “We laid a trap inside your trap. That, and we kind of wanted to be sure this rattail of a shitstorm ends here. No more man behind the curtain behind the curtain behind the curtain.” She turns to her double. “And it didn’t even cost me my boon, just a promise of chaos, confusion and a spot of murder.”

“I gave in too easily, little sister,” male Stiles drawls, before shrugging and suddenly melting into… well, they’re not really shadows. Shadows don’t have teeth. It flicks its many tails, sniffs once, derisively and then steps past the gold line on delicate paws, coming to sit beside Stiles primly. Gold may hold a dragon, but it does shit all for a chaos god. With a flick of one tail, the gold dust disappears, effectively taken away as a weapon. 

From the way Kate and Gerard suddenly shift their grip on their weapons, the bullets inside of them have mysteriously vanished, too. No more gold for the dragon. Whoops. 

When it’s on Stiles’ side, Void’s style is actually awesome. 

She beams up at Gerard. The trap is sprung and it’s empty. He’s had his evil monologue and told them everything they still needed to know. He’s played out. 

“We will still kill your pack!” Kate snaps and there it is, that glint of a true fanatic in her eyes. Stiles wonders if she looked like this when she watched the Hales burn.

Stiles winks at her, licks her blunt, human teeth and wonders if dragons eat bitch. For Kate Argent, she might be willing to give it a try. Hell, after the past five days, she’ll figure out her full shift just to snap each and every single hunter in this clearing like a fucking toothpick before ripping out their hearts and tearing off their heads to make sure they stay dead. She hopes some of that reflects in her expression, because her voice is saccharine when she speaks. “You haven’t answered the second question. Why didn’t you pack it in when you realized who’s with me?”

“I told you,” Gerard starts, but Stiles cuts him off ruthlessly before he can regain any sort of control over the situation, “He didn’t mean Chris and Alli. He meant them.”

She waves a hand and at her signal, the pack solidifies into one solid unit, not intimidated in the least by the dozen armed men aiming at them. Lydia has a shield ready and kevlar works for all kinds of creatures. To their left, Erica and Boyd bleed out of the trees, followed by Jordan and the Sheriff. On their right, Scott, Kira and Theo. All of them armed, armored and angry.

Stiles counts twenty plus bad guys in the area surrounding the cabin, plus Argent Asshole #1 and #2, plus the brunette witch that has disappeared back into the cabin after her circle failed to hold… anything. If she’s smart enough to run, Stiles might let her leave just for that. 

They have half as many people, but compared to a few betas who apparently prefer to fight with guns, they pack supernatural whoopass. Banshee, dragon, hellhound, kitsune, alpha, nogitsune. Not to mention sheer. Fucking. Rage. And a shitton of police issued weapons and body armor. 

A few of the goons shift in place, suddenly unsure. They almost steadied again after Stiles turned out to not be Stiles, but now they’re suddenly flanked. The second surprise in under five minutes. Makes a henchman wonder what else the other side is up to. Good. Let them shiver in their boots and jump at shadows, because Team Awesome is just about out of tricks. 

Kate, arrogant ass that she is, shrugs the little show of strength off with a flip of her hair, claws extended. She’s either really fucking brave or so far removed from reality, she really thinks everything is going to come up Argent. Two guesses as to which Stiles would bet on and the first one doesn’t count. 

“So? A few more dead mutts won’t matter much.”

“Ah, but you see, Caterina,” a new voice announces from the far side of the cabin, before rounding it, followed by a swarm of black-clad hunters, a handful of Argent goons already subdued between them. Stiles assumes they’re human. Any wolves would have been killed on sight, not knocked out. Plus, kudos to them for managing to sneak up on a bunch of werewolves. “You are one of the mutts, too.”

What? Stiles said ‘just about out of tricks’, not ‘completely out of tricks’. 

Araya Calavera cocks her shotgun and aims it, dead center, at Gerard. “I expected better from an Argent. But you are just an animal now, a filthy dog, killing my people for your little games. How did you say?” she fakes a thoughtful hum. “Ah, yes. A few more dead mutts won’t hurt.”

One of the disarmed Argents makes a terrified noise and grabs for a Calavera gun. It goes off and suddenly, everyone explodes into motion. Stiles’ estimate was off a bit, because more Argents pour in from behind the cabin, the Calaveras meeting them head on, while her own people flank them and take them down ruthlessly. 

The pack pours forward, aiming for the wall of guns separating them from Stiles, while their friends move around and meet the Calaveras to join ranks and go for the rest of the Argents en masse. There are a ton of blue eyes. Just how many hunters did Gerard turn? His own little private army of codeless hunter-wolf hybrids? Gross!

The Sheriff only shoots to wound, but a quick glance shows Theo cleaning up after him without hesitation, Isaac helping as he harries the hunters from the opposite flank. Void gives a freaky little giggle before entering the fray, going for the jugular of a nearby Argent dumb enough to aim at it. 

Stiles shifts between one breath and the next, slipping into his taller, leaner form and lunging for Gerard and punching his gun right out of his hand. The fucker wants a dragon? Stiles is going to give him one. 

Peter breaks through the line first and leaps, landing next to Stiles for an instant, before shooting forward, all alphapackrage as he goes for the woman who burned his entire pack alive. 

After that, it’s mostly pandemonium. 

Blood, screams, shots fired, roars of rage and cries of pain. 

Gerard is old, but he’s fast with the stolen alpha spark in his veins, evading Stiles deftly, even as he’s not landing any hits of his own. An arrow whizzes past them both, Alli trying to help out but missing. Stiles uses the momentary distraction to land a solid swipe to the old man’s chest before he has to twist out of the way of the barrel suddenly aiming for him. Second gun. Even without gold bullets, he’ll have to decline. No thanks. He roars, claws at the wrist holding the gun and kicks it out of the way. It earns him a kick in the ribs that feels like being hit with a freight train. He goes down, rolls, and comes back up swinging. 

+

Peter is literally seeing red and has been ever since the darach, on her knees and begging for her life, uttered the name Kate Argent. 

She was dead. For almost five years now, Peter has lived with the knowledge that, even though he didn’t get to slowly rend her limb from limb, she’s at least dead at the hands of another werewolf, is at least _gone_. 

He had nightmares, early on, of her coming for Stiles and later, the rest of the pack. Of having to suffer through his packbonds breaking again, one by one by one as the pain and grief drive him insane. 

And now here she is, alive, and trying to do exactly that. And he won’t let her. Not again. Not ever again. 

His wolf howls in ferocious, raging agreement and they attack.

+

Stiles ducks, weaves, narrowly avoids getting impaled and rolls backwards just to get a second’s respite. Damn, but the old man is fast. Out of the corner of his eyes he notices one of the Argent hunters sprout fur. 

Damn it. Of course Gerard taught his evil henchmen how to fullshift. Fuck it. The Calaveras nearby team up immediately and set on the wolf before he’s fully changed. A sonic blast from the edge of the battle helps them out, but they have the wolf caught, subdued and killed in under five seconds. If they didn’t hate everything Stiles and the people he loves stood for, he might be impressed by their efficiency. 

He turns back to his own fight to find the old man ten feet away, casually brushing dirt off his clothes.

“Not going the way you expected it to?” Gerard drawls, as he straightens the collar of his shirt, the pretentious, murderous asshole, and then lunges again. 

“Just taking a little longer,” Stiles answers as he lashes out with a foot and hears the satisfying crack of a shinbone breaking. He presses his advantage with a solid kick to the face, several swipes to the chest and finally, a knee to the nose. One of them has been fighting for the past decade and the other has been playing dead. There is really just one way this can end, even if it’s getting a bit tedious.

Gerard goes down, bleeding and growling. 

Still an alpha, though. Still healing at rapid speeds. So Stiles just keeps hitting with fists encased in flame until he gets past the man’s defenses, keeps clawing and shredding and _hurting_ until he’s at the old man’s jugular, half wondering if this is really is because after all that build-up?

Too easy. 

“Spark!” A voice bellows from behind, followed by a roar Stiles would know in his sleep. 

He spins instinctively to find most everyone in the clearing either dead or frozen and Kate Argent looming over Peter, on his knees, bleeding from a deep stomach wound. One of her hands is in his hair. The other is poised to rip his throat out. 

At Stiles’ feet, Gerard laughs. 

And Stiles – Stiles can take being hunted and harassed and kidnapped and hurt. He can take being drugged and jerked around like a puppet on a string. He can take the pain of knowing innocents are dying in his name, can live with his father hating him, can deal with being back in this shithole of a town, can face all his demons and come out on top, he can fight the father of a man he respects and he can kill and maim in the name of his pack.

All of that, no problem. 

He can do it. 

But he can’t watch the people he loves hurt and he can’t watch Peter, whom he loves, who loves him, his mate, his alpha, his lover, can’t watch Peter, hurt and broken and so good, be hurt by the woman who already killed him once, who ripped him to shreds and left the pieces. He can’t watch him die. 

He can’t. 

He refuses. 

And if she thinks she gets to hurt even one hair on his head, if she thinks she has the right, then she’s severely fucking wrong because Stiles is a motherfucking dragon and he’s _done_. 

Suddenly, everything shrinks and shifts inward and down and it takes Stiles a long second to realize that actually it’s him, growing up and out.

Shifting. 

His body expands like he’s stretching after hours sitting in a cramped space, his senses flood with _everything_ and fire roars in his veins. The people around him keep getting smaller, keep stopping to stare up at him. Lydia’s mouth forms a surprised ‘O’, his father is muttering something with an awed expression, Gerard is cursing. Not that Stiles can make out the words over the rushing in his ears, the whoosh of… everything. Muscles stretching, bones reshaping, lungs expanding, heart beating double time, beating, beating – 

Oh. He has wings. They flap at his back, a slow pendulum, whipping up a storm with every movement even before he’s done, before his skin settles around him, completely new and as familiar as his reflection, absolutely _his_ and absolutely _right_.

He has half a second to think _how could mom ever give this up_ before he moves. 

First, he snaps at the tiny thing at his ankles, biting it clean in half despite its screams. A trophy? Him? Something hung over the mantle? Never. No-one’s prey. No-one’s trophy. 

He shoots out a single leg and snatches the _bitch_ away from his mate and flings her through the air like a toy. He considers, briefly, setting her on fire, but mate. He has too many nightmares about fire, already. 

Kate slams into the side of the cabin with enough force to make it shake. 

She lands with a cry of pain and he lumbers after her on new, familiar feet. Her cries of pain turn into words, -“never find them without me! Your precious niece and nephew. Call off your freak here, or I’ll never-.”

He grabs her again and shakes until her neck snaps. Then he flings her aside, carelessly and turns to survey the area for more danger to matepackfamily. The strangers flee, taking their dead and wounded. After a moment, only pack remains. Only safety. 

He turns toward redeyesmate, sniffs him once, finds him healing already. 

Okay. Good. That was weirdly anticlimactic. But then, he’s currently the size of a bus. So. 

Whatever, right?

The world grows again.

+

Stiles is naked, confused and has a slight feeling of vertigo as reality reasserts itself. He stumbles. Did he just? He looks over to where he last Gerard and almost heaves. He was joking about eating people. Oh god. Did he? Are those toothmarks? Giant, freaking…. He takes two steps backwards, get a few signals messed up between biped and quadruped, and can’t quite stop staring at Gerard and Gerard. Both of him. Both halves.

Kate looks like a ragdoll. 

Peter catches him just before his bare ass hits dirt, grunting in pain, and they both sink to the ground. Lydia is there, suddenly, checking them both over for injuries, while Allison hauls a healing Isaac closer. Boyd and Erica follow, then Theo and Chris. They all sort of sink into a pile, pack or not, and just breathe. 

The bad guys are gone. Or dead. Very dead. Stiles just turned into a giant ass dragon. They won. He’s naked. Sleep deprivation is also apparently kicking in right now. Or maybe that’s the adrenaline crash. Or the hysteria from turning into a iant ass dragon and biting someone in half. 

Stiles surveys the damage. Tries to. Vision blurry. Bad. The Calaveras are gone. They seem to have taken most of the goons with them. Gerard and Kate lie where Stiles killed them. He looks away. They deserved it. 

He takes in his own. All of them bloody, most of them limping or hurt in some form or another. All of them alright. 

Then, finally, Theo pipes up with what they’re all thinking. “You know, when you said you were a dragon, I didn’t expect you to be twenty fucking feet tall!”

He sounds kind of punch drunk, too. 

“You had wings,” Scott pipes up from where he’s helping Kira bandage her upper arm. 

“And fangs bigger than my head,” Isaac adds. He giggles. 

“You’re gorgeous, sweetheart,” Peter adds, quiet and exhausted and radiating contentment. 

“Not bad, for a fledgling,” Void announces as it slinks closer, just to see everyone shiver and cringe for a moment. Stiles glares at it and it laughs. It’s using his voice, too. “I enjoyed the chaos you brought me. I’ll leave, now. Maybe I’ll follow the little hunters back home and make them turn on each other. Or find the Celestial bitch and settle the debt.” It shrugs, a fluid movement of shadow and form and it’s still terrifying, but Stiles is too exhausted to appreciate it. 

And anyway, he gets the feeling the thing likes him. 

It confirms the thought when it chuffs at him, flicks a few tails and orders, “Boon or not, find me in a few centuries, little brother. When your anchors have become dust and your spark a forest fire. We’ll play.”

It grins at him, all teeth and darkness, and then it’s gone, between one blink and the next. Well, that’s not ominous and vaguely horribly at all.

The Sheriff noisily exhales. “That was… terrifying.”

“I need to warn my mom,” Kira adds, voice shaky. That seems to serve as a signal, because suddenly everyone’s shifting. 

Stiles groans. His bones are aching. “Just leave me here. I’ll catch up in a week or so.”

Erica gives a little giggle-snort as she rolls unsteadily to her feet. “Is this what life is like as a werewolf?”

“Only on special occasion,” Isaac consoles her. “And Thursdays. Thursdays are kind of weird.”

“I never could get the hang of Thursdays,” Stiles, Peter, Kira and Erica all quote, only slightly out of sync. 

Lydia groans. “You’re all pathetic nerds.”

Then she crawls over Peter to plant herself in Stiles’ naked lap, curls up and announces, “I’m staying with you.”

Okay. Alright. Everyone’s okay, everyone’s joking, the deity in Stiles’ debt has left the building. It’s over. 

It’s over. 

All of the stress of the past few weeks, all the dying, it’s done. Over. They won. And it wasn’t even hard, because they were many and Gerard and Kate were so fucking arrogant.

Stiles is no-one’s trophy. Well, except Peter’s. He’d make an awesome trophy husband. He giggles. 

Holy fuck, it’s over.

“Can I sleep for a week now? Pretty please?”

+  
   
+

Epilogue

+

Stiles is processing. 

It looks a lot like lying on his childhood bed and staring at the walls-turned-murder-board, but it’s processing. It’s been two days since the boss battle and he’s still trying to catch up to everything. 

Deaton is dead. Stiles helped set free an ancient god of chaos, which apparently likes him because an alternate reality version of him killed it. Ok. Peter’s worst nightmare came pretty much true when he found out the woman who ruined his life and killed everything he loved is still alive. So they killed her. Stiles killed her. In dragon form. 

Gerard Argent, who one might argue is the root of Kate’s evil, was also not dead. Stiles has hung around a drunk Chris Argent a time or two. He knows that in the father shit stakes, Chris definitely wins, hands down. He knows Allison was terrified of the man as a child. Stiles killed him, too. By biting him in half. In dragon form. 

There are two newly turned werewolves, who want to be part of their pack, a dead alpha in the woods and a whole bunch of innocents dead in town because of Stiles. Because the Argents paid a darach to cast a chaos spell and the nogitsune sent it through the roof. The darach is dead, too. 

There are way too many bodies on the ground.

Theo is hanging out, so are Chris, Erica and Boyd. Scott is making puppy-dog eyes at Stiles and Lydia is making cow eyes at Parrish. 

Stiles is a dragon. A trueblooded dragon. He can change shape at will. Technically, that means he could change his own face not just to female, but to anything he wants. He could be anyone. He’s a bit overwhelmed by that. 

Also, Void said ‘centuries’. Because Stiles will, apparently, live that long. The people he loves won’t. 

His mother… god. Claudia. Running from Argents, from becoming a trophy on a wall, hiding here, having Stiles. Going mad from fear and leaving Stiles her enemies, like some fucked up inheritance. She never even _told_ him. Any of it. Not one word. 

And his dad. He doesn’t even know where to start with his dad. 

So he’s processing. 

It might take a few weeks. 

Which, of course, means he gets exactly twenty minutes before a gentle knock sounds on the door. He doesn’t need his newly enhanced senses to tell him who it is. He’s known that knock all his life.

“Come in, Dad.”

His father steps in, gently closing the door and leaning against it. He fumbles for words and for once, Stiles lets him, doesn’t fill the silence for him. In the end, the man offers, “I left my badge in the study.”

Stiles blinks. All his brain is wrapped up in the processing thing. “What?”

“My badge. Lydia said it might be a good idea to leave it elsewhere when talking to you.”

Stiles stares. He still doesn’t get it. “Because I’m here to talk to you as your father, not a cop.”

Biting back on a snort, Stiles finally sits up. That’d be a first. But if Lydia instigated this entire thing, then it’s no wonder everyone suddenly had places to be a little while ago, leaving the two Stilinskis alone in the house. Traitors. 

He motions for his father to sit, and he does, perching on the desk chair. Then he sighs, rubs both hands over his face and visibly steels himself. “Is your life always like this past week has been? Because, Jesus Christ, Stiles.”

“No. Fuck no. I wouldn’t have made it out of high school if it were always like this.”

Which, he realizes half a second too late, is a whole ‘nother can of worms. Well, shit. 

“Right,” his dad says, voice very even. “High school. Because that’s how long this has been going on. And you never even considered telling me.”

Later, he’s going to blame it on drained batteries, but right now, Stiles just doesn’t care enough to find an excuse. “I never told you anything. Because you didn’t want to hear it. You needed me to function. So I functioned.”

Because grief for Claudia, a bottle, and work, were all there was room for in the Sheriff’s life. Stiles needed to function, to be the good kid, to not make trouble. He needed to be normal and not make waves. 

Lydia definitely primed the man before sending him up here because Stiles can see the protest rising in him, can see his mouth opening and then, after a long moment, clicking shut. 

Stiles now owes Lydia a day of shopping on his credit card. 

“Is that why you never came home? Why you went all the way to the East Coast for college?”

God. Stiles rubs his face, scratches at his hair and wishes for Peter. “I’m a pansexual, spastic, ADHD asshole who runs with wolves, banshees and hunters and can’t stick to a gender. At eighteen, this town felt like death for me.”

There are bodies in the dirt, out in the woods and in the cemeteries, that bear witness to that. And a borderline alcoholic father who had no time for him wasn’t enough to draw him back. Not with an entire world out there, waiting for him. He didn’t have the first clue who or what he was when he and Lyds left. If he’d stayed, he never would have found out. 

(Never would have found Peter, either.)

Case in point, his dad muttering under his breath, “And you’d know how death felt.”

Here they are. The argument they didn’t have. “I have never killed anyone who hasn’t tried to kill me or someone else first. I have never hurt anyone who didn’t attack me. I have never robbed anyone who couldn’t stand the loss. Most of the time, it’s not like this. A lot of what we do is arbitrating conflicts, freeing hostages, stealing artifacts that pose a danger to regular humans. We do what we have to do and we do obey laws. Just not human laws. Supernatural laws work differently, but it’s what we are and it’s what we are subject to. And I need to know, right now, if you can deal with that.”

He takes a deep breath. Only a quarter of that was a lie and his father has never been able to tell without facts to disprove Stiles’ words. “Because damn it, dad, you arrested me on what basically amounts to a whim and were fully prepared to believe your only son’s a serial killer. If that’s your opinion of me, if you really trust me so little, then I need you to tell me, right now, so I can pack my shit and be done with it.”

Because these days, Stiles has self-worth. He knows who he is and what he is. And he knows what he means to the people who love him and what that is supposed to mean. Condemnation is not love. He needs to know if, from here on out, he has a dad or a sheriff for a father. Because he’s tired of the sheriff. 

The man looks away, studying the scrawls on the wall by the window. Deaton’s name in all caps. “I was so mad, when the prints came through. I thought about your sudden visit, how squirrely you were acting and I jumped to conclusions and I was so disappointed and hurt that I stopped thinking clearly. I’m sorry, Stiles. I’m sorry. I want-“

He trails off, fingers clenching and unclenching rhythmically. He’s so tense, Stiles can see his arms shake with it. Finally, his father meets his gaze. “Your mother drove herself mad, hiding what she was from me. I lost her, because she was afraid to trust me.”

“Dad-“

“Don’t. I can read between the lines and your friends talk a lot. I know that’s what happened. I know she wasn’t sick in the human sense. And Stiles, Son, I can’t lose you the same way. Because you can’t be yourself with me. Because you feel like you can’t trust me. So I don’t want to know details of the illegal shit you get up to, but by god, I want to be part of your life. I want to be your father. Please, please, let me.”

It’s not the unconditional love Stiles has learned to live without a long time ago, but it’s more than he honestly ever expected. It’s… a beginning. A hand, extended. 

He nods, jerkily, gladly, because that’s his _dad_ , _wanting him_. 

And that feels damn good. 

+

“So is this where you used to come with all your hot dates?” Peter teases, slipping an arm around Stiles and scooting closer on the rock Stiles has picked for their picnic. Because they deserve to have nice things after the past few weeks. And after the conversation with her dad, she couldn’t stand being in the house anymore. Too many memories. 

Everyone returned from various errands early in the afternoon and just folded onto the couch to relax for some peace and quiet. Lydia has a line of what took the hearts of those poor people and they’re planning to take it down soon, but for now, peace and fucking quiet. 

Stiles snuggles into her wolf and sighs. “Yeah, because spastic, flailing me got so much tail, you can’t even imagine.” Then she adds, “Lyds is the only one I ever brought up here. It’s my think spot.”

“Well, you picked a very pretty spot,” Peter consoles, nosing against her temple. 

They sit for a while, their food and packs forgotten at the bottom of the rock. It’s peaceful. Nice. 

“What are we going to do now?” Stiles asks, eventually, because someone has to. The peace is just an illusion. There are still too many loose ends from what Gerard kicked over. The missing-hearts case is the easiest of them all, because it’s not personal. 

There’s her dad and their tentative truce, there’s Scott. There’s Boyd and Erica needing a pack, the hurt look in Chris’ eyes, the things Kate said before she died. There’s the Calaveras still lurking in the wings. Their promise to Parrish still stands, as do the cow eyes Lydia keeps making at the hellhound. If she hasn’t banged the guy by the end of the week, Stiles will be a) severely disappointed and b) losing fifty bucks to Isaac. 

“Theo asked me formally to be part of this pack,” Peter offers. Which… is more a complication than a plan.

Stiles blinks. “He did?” 

“Mhm. His reasoning was that we’re just fucked up enough to be entertaining.”

Stiles mulls that over. “He’s lonely.”

“You like him,” Peter accuses, mildly. He and Theo are hilarious in their dislike for each other, which is mostly based on the fact that they’re too much alike and both like to flirt with Stiles. Theo’s not serious about it, but Peter never seems to get that message. 

“I could have been him,” she corrects. 

“Never. Do I accept him?”

“That’s your choice, alpha.”

Peter hums again. “We’ll take it to the pack.”

“Boyd and Erica, too?”

One more hum. 

“Are we going to talk about what Kate said? That some of your family is still alive?”

Because that’s the biggest can of worms to come out of this mess, by far. It’s hope, and that’s deadly in and of itself. 

Peter had four nieces and three nephews. They don’t even know who Kate meant. Doesn’t matter, though. The oldest, Laura, would be twenty-two now. The youngest, Ava, barely ten. They’ll find them, whoever they are, and they’ll take them home. Maybe, in her right mind, Stiles would have let Kate live a little longer, for more information. But probably not.

“And then what?” Peter challenges. “Our lives are not set up for children.”

“They might not be children,” Stiles points out, reasonably, then adds, “and even if they are, we’ll manage. They’re pack.”

Peter exhales, long and slow and relaxes into her, a sudden weight. She braces against it and admits, “I always knew this town would draw me back in.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Draw me in and never let me go again. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Home is you and the pack, but this place….”

They found out the darach was abusing the nemeton for her chaos spell, twisting it further. Another thing to add to the list. Another thing chaining Stiles here. 

And to think, only a few hours ago, she told the Sheriff there was nothing here for her. And there isn’t, not really, but still….

“You belong to it, even if you don’t like it,” Peter explains. “Pack lands. It felt the same to me, before….” He shakes his head, shakes off the grief. It’s over now. For real this time. “This could be pack land. It could be home.”

Stiles closes her eyes, thinks it through. Boyd and Erica belong here. Scott and her dad are here. Chris has been making noises about settling down closer to them. Lydia looks at Parrish likes she wants to eat him but also, more importantly, like she wants to keep him afterward. Maybe. And with kids potentially joining the pack….

New York is not a place for a big pack. Nor for children. They’ve been on the move, chasing payday after payday, thrill after thrill, for years. Maybe… maybe it’s time to slow down a little. 

“Retire?” She’s only in her twenties. 

“Hmph,” Peter hedges. “Slow down a little. Take a few more legal jobs, maybe. Let the heat die down.”

The whole mess with Deucalion and now the Argents did cause a pretty big stir. Add to that that Stiles has a brand new shift to get under control. Yeah. “A break.”

“A break,” Peter confirms. “We’ll take it to the pack.”

She imagines it, all of them in sleepy little Beacon Hills. “Scott is never going to stop moaning about the crap I bring to this town.”

Peter snorts. “He’ll be right in the middle of it, and you know it.”

Well, yeah. Scott is a good friend. Stiles didn’t even realize how much she misses him until she got him back. 

Still, “This is supposed to be a relaxing afternoon. Stop making me plot my future and go fetch the sandwiches.”

“You started it, sweetheart,” Peter fires back, never missing a beat as he shoves her off the rock toward their backpacks. 

She screeches in outrage, catches herself – barely – and glares up at her mate. “Just for that, I’m eating it all by myself.”

Peter’s answering grin is predatory. “You can try.”

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tell me something?

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment on your way out.


End file.
